Set during the uncertain early days of World War II, this suspenseful story from the New York Times bestselling author of City of Light follows the work of photojournalist Claire Shipley as she captures America’s race to develop life-saving antibiotics—an assignment that will involve blackmail, espionage, and murder.

A Fierce Radiance

I won this through First Reads and thought that it would be really interesting. As far as I can tell it's a historical romance about a doctor who is trying to find a way to mass-produce penicillin and an up-and-coming photographer who wants to tell the story. The divorced photographer lost her young daughter to blood-poisoning caused by a small scrape several years later. I learned that it was really easy to die from stupid stuff like skinned knees. I also learned that the military conscripted the disparate penicillin researchers to speed up the development of mass-production techniques so they would lose fewer soldiers and get them back to the front sooner. With so much going for it, why did I give up on this book after reading 211 of its 530 pages?   First, the author does the one think I really hate to see in historical fiction. She includes nearly every fact she found interesting even if its completely irrelevant to the story. For example, the researcher and his sister (also a researcher) lost their parents to the 1918 influenza epidemic. In one scene (fairly close to where I gave up), the sister is alone in her apartment and starts thinking about her parents' deaths and how people had to bring their dead down to the street to be picked up by death carts from the churches. The city ran out of coffins and people had to be buried in mass graves. This flashback takes up 5-6 pages and doesn't do anything to move the main story forward. Futhermore, the character thinking about the epidemic was four years old at the time her parents died and wouldn't have even remembered all that detail. I lasted through 211 pages of similarly irrelevant flashbacks that seemed to serve the sole purpose of showing how much the author had learned.  The second reason I gave up is that the characters are so impossibly perfect, I couldn't relate to them. They're all beautiful or handsome, successful, and smart. They are flat and their emotions seem unreal. The romance between the doctor and the photographer progresses way too quickly with no romantic tension.   The last reason I gave up is the lack of a clear point of view. If two characters are together, the author bounces from one character's innermost thoughts to another's with nary a paragraph change between. It's annoying and confusing.   I really, really wanted to like this book and I really, really want to know how the penicillin thing works out. I just really, really don't want to wade through another 319 pages to get there. I have two shelves of books to read and several more on my Nook. I just don't have the time to spend wading through all this to find the little bit of story that's interesting.

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