A Fall of Marigolds

By Susan Meissner,

Book cover of A Fall of Marigolds

Book description

A beautiful scarf connects two women touched by tragedy in this compelling, emotional novel from the author of As Bright as Heaven and The Last Year of the War.

September 1911. On Ellis Island in New York Harbor, nurse Clara Wood cannot face returning to Manhattan, where the man she…

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Why read it?

2 authors picked A Fall of Marigolds as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?

I can’t resist a good dual timeline, and A Fall of Marigolds delivers. The primary timeline centers on an Ellis Island nurse who’s adopted the hospital as her refuge after escaping the notorious Triangle Shirtwaist Fire; the secondary, a woman who loses her husband on 9/11. There are thematic parallels—loss, grief, healing, love—as well as striking similarities between the two events, but it is a scarf that ties the two characters directly together. 

I was only three years old on 9/11, so I don’t have my own memories of it. Even to me, Meissner conveys the tragedy so intimately that…

From Addison's list on New York City past to present.

In this two-timeline story set in New York City, a nurse at the quarantine station on Ellis Island in 1911 is connected to the wife of a 9/11 Twin Towers victim through a beautiful scarf that survives through the decades. The Triangle Shirtwaist factory disaster also figures into this story, so there is so much to learn here – including the need for nurses to scrub the scales off the skin of patients recovering from scarlet fever! Yikes.

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