3 out of 4 stars
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In the Days of the Giants by RJ Petrella the story portrays a doctor's first intern year at Boston City Hospital (BCH). The book shows his day-to-day work in the hospital including interactions with patients, and the relationships he has with fellow employees of the hospital.
The book is written in the narrative form by the intern Slater Barnes, but the unusual part is that some of the book is also narrated by his father from heaven. Slater doesn't know his dad is adding to this narrative story. His father explains that Slater may not give that many details so he is providing them.
Slater joins Boston City Hospital right before one of the hospital's buildings are demolished, and rumors start to fly that the hospital may be closing. Then, shortly after hearing these rumors, the hospital's employees find out the hospital is getting a 250 million dollar loan so they felt better about the chances of the hospital remaining open. The next rumors are that the public Boston City Hospital will merge with their private sister hospital, Academy. Slater and his co-workers are baffled why they only hear about this proposed merger after the fact. The staff at Boston City Hospital weren't told beforehand about the proposed merger, or asked for their input. Most workers at Boston City Hospital want to work at a public hospital which treats everyone and doesn't turn people away for lack of insurance. There are many instances shown of the different mindset of the staff of the private Academy Hospital in which they seem to care more about the insurance, or lack thereof, than the quality of care. Slater, and many of his co-workers of the public hospital, don't see this merger as anything other than harmful for the staff, and for the patients in the community.
Slater unfortunately also is dealing with health issues himself and consuming alcohol has really become a death sentence for him. This is a problem for him and you see his attempts to overcome his addiction At the same time all the drama with the hospital is going on Slater questions his desire to even practice medicine at all because of his health issues.
There is also a mystery as a character in the book is murdered. I will not divulge much about the murder as I don't want to give a spoiler. But I can tell you I didn't guess the murderer, and that I enjoyed reading the other twists at the end of the book.
So, overall I liked the book even though I'm not the biggest fan of narrated books the author presented it in a way that I enjoyed reading it. I felt the author did a great job with the plot and of developing the characters.
But, the one thing that made it a hard read for me was the amount of grammatical errors in the book. With all things considered I have given Days of the Giants a rating of 3 out of 4 stars. I didn't give it a 2 star rating as I liked all other aspects of the book other than the errors. I didn't give it a 4 star rating because of the abundance of errors.
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Days of the Giants
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