Wickett's Remedy

Lydia Kilkenny, a shopgirl living in turn-of-the-century South Boston, watches her fortunes dramatically change when she marries well-heeled yet sickly Henry Wickett. Shortly after the wedding, Henry gives up on the medical studies he loathes and begins to sell his own brand of eponymous health elixir. He then promptly falls ill and succumbs to a deadly strain of influenza.

His death heralds the arrival of the 1918 Spanish influenza epidemic that changed the country by killing "more Americans in ten months than died in all 20th-century wars combined." Lydia volunteers to work with a medical team that is studying the source of the influenza on Gallups Island, which is near Boston but worlds away from blue-collar Southie.

The dead, both singularly and collectively, chime in from the afterlife, commenting on the story action in the book's margins. Goldberg's narrative relates that Lydia ran with a sick boy in her arms all the way to a hospital, but the margin note reads, "Carney Hospital was half a mile from the flat. We strongly doubt Lydia ran this distance, especially with a child in her arms." The notes are at times funny, sad or distracting, but they add a much-needed layer to the story. Lydia is a milquetoast character and her story alone is not enough to sustain a novel.

Despite the sickness that rages throughout Boston and the rest of the country, the story lacks the dramatic momentum you'd think would be inherent in a book about a raging epidemic. Lydia, admirably wanting to help those around her, chooses a path that takes her out of the chaos and instead to a quiet island where nothing much happens. The story is bound to her decisions and follows her unexciting choice, thereby losing what tension was there to begin with. While the novel is obviously painstakingly researched for authenticity, the drama of the story dies not of the flu, but of neglect.—Beth Dugan