Name: Across a Broken Shore
ISBN: 9781635830422

Amy Trueblood

In 1936 San Francisco, eighteen-year-old Willa MacCarthy is bound for the convent. But when she discovers her love of medicine, she will defy her family and work with a female doctor to care for those building the Golden Gate Bridge.

Across a Broken Shore

Leelynn Brady

Disclaimer: I voluntarily read and reviewed an advanced copy of this book. All thoughts and opinions are my own. Thank you to Flux and Fantastic Flying Book Tours for this free copy.

This was a book where I couldn’t help but root for the main character, mostly because she had to hide her passion for studying anatomy from her hella religious Irish family. To me, having a character, especially a teenage girl, having to conform to society’s norms and her family’s rules because of no real good reason at all irks me so much, and it makes me want them to just rebel in the best way.

I know that’s not how I usually start a review but I had to say that. I think that’s what really made me like Willa, and I just wish that her parents didn’t have a religious stick up their ass to the point that they wanted to send her to a convent after she turned eighteen.

I mean, she saved her brother from bleeding out to death for crying out loud. That’s how the book starts basically. She’s listening to her mother and the local priest talk about how she’s so excited to take her vows to become a nun – yeah, that’s a lie. Isn’t lying a sin in the Catholic faith? – and she hears one of her brothers screaming at the top of his lungs because whoa there.

He cut off two of his fingers. Well, not the whole fingers, but enough that he almost lost too much blood.

None of the other family members knew what to do, and they didn’t even spring into action to take him to the local doctor to save his life. But Willa did.

She even did a makeshift tourniquet to stop the bleeding as much as possible until the doctor was able to help him. And lo and behold, the former local doctor retired months ago and who else is there to help him but a new woman doctor named Dr. Catherine Winston.

At that point, Willa knew that her dream of working in the medical field was closer to being a reality than she thought, because here was a real life example right in front of her face. Not to mention Dr. Winston offered to mentor her?? How lucky is that?

This was an interesting book, and I liked that Willa was able to get some mentoring in from someone that she could really learn a lot from, and see herself as in a few years or so. It means so much more when you are able to see someone that is so much like you in a career that you want to do, because then you start to believe that if they can do it, so can you. I feel like that was a huge takeaway for me and I hope it is for other people that read this as well.

Across a Broken Shore

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