“The Moonlight Healers” is an Empathetic, Meditative Decade-Spanning Debut https://ift.tt/broHLjg
Intertwining past and present, author Elizabeth Becker’s The Moonlight Healers crosses continents and spans decades to tell the story of the Winston women, who can heal with the touch of their hands. Becker’s debut novel presents a warm, contemplative narrative about the power of nurses.
Becker explores the Winston women through two primary timelines, settings, and protagonists: Louise, a high school senior in Virginia in 2019 on the precipice of learning about her family’s powers, and her great-grandmother Helene, a young nurse in Nazi-occupied France.
The Moonlight Healers posits the societal importance of the nurse — a role that has traditionally been placed on women — and the fine line between life and death that they tread every day while working with patients. Sometimes, the most healing thing a caregiver can do is let a person go in comfort and dignity. At the same time, the novel lays bare just how heart-wrenching that decision can be.
Becker’s wisdom on the subject is evident; she was once a pediatric nurse herself. In the author’s note, she reflects that the story behind The Moonlight Healers can be traced back to a night when she was assigned to care for a dying child. Becker writes: “Those two nights changed me as a nurse, and as a person. The Moonlight Healers is a reflection of those changes, when I came to understand that death, even the death of a child, can contain multitudes — grief and darkness of course, but also beauty and true healing.”
This juxtaposition — the rise, crescendo, and fade of life’s course — is explored throughout The Moonlight Healers with tender hope and light. Becker’s prose reaches for beauty by narrowing in on fine details: night skies littered with stars, sunsets exploding with pink, swirling leaves on a windy day, a chorus of cicadas and frogs on an Appalachian night, land dotted with strawberry patches, peach blossoms just beginning to bloom. This evocative prose weaves between imagery of wartime bloodshed — dirt, grime, and red, red, red everywhere.
One example emblematic of Becker’s prose is when Helene, along with other nurses, is led into Dieppe after the Allied soldiers suffered a catastrophic defeat. Still coming to terms with her healing touch, it marks the first time she has come face-to-face with death on such a devastating scale. As they arrive at Dieppe, she is struck by a smell that reminds her of home:
It hit her like a wave. It was home, the scent her father once carried back from the docks, woven into the fabric of his jacket as he twirled Helene in great circles, her face buried into his neck. It was the rain outside her bedroom window at night, her first breath in the morning, the way the scent changed, softened or deepened with the winds and tide … The salt air rose, taken in by warm gusts of air. Outside, the streets grew crowded with other trucks and ambulances.
By momentarily dipping into dreamlike prose, Becker’s pivot into describing the Dieppe battlefield is even more stark. This embodies Helene’s own wide-eyed horror as she takes in death all around her. The excerpt continues:
As they inched through Dieppe’s city center, a group of Allied soldiers marched slowly past the back of the truck. A few were limping, their shoulders slumped, bandages soaked with blood tied around their arms and legs.
There was a loud exclamation, and a German soldier came into view, his large, black gun shoved so hard into one man’s back that he fell to the ground. Beside Helene, the other girls let out moans and clutched each other. Across from her the sisters prayed, their hands folded.
The Moonlight Healers threads in and out of such imagery, giving Becker’s prose an overall hazy but disarming effect. By crafting some passages that lull, Becker’s darker plot points land heavier.
While not as explicitly witchy, The Moonlight Healers is reminiscent of Alice Hoffman’s 1995 novel Practical Magic, focusing on female friendships and the consequences of magic, even when used with good intentions. Both novels are rendered with dreamy prose that vividly paints their settings in a way that readers will find themselves sinking deeper and deeper into.
Louise, the protagonist in the 2019 timeline, accidentally discovers her healing powers. The day after her childhood best friend, Peter, confesses his feelings for her, he dies in an accident, and she revives him — the impetus of finding her inherited power. To learn about her family’s healing legacy and to run away from her problems, she escapes to her grandmother’s orchard in Crozet, Virginia. While the focus is on Helene and Louise, other women are folded into the novel in both timelines, including Agnes, Bobbie, Camille, Elisabeth, Irene, and Cecelia.
At its core, The Moonlight Healers is a meditation on the bonds between the Winston women and their slippery gift. It also functions as historical fiction, giving readers glimpses into World War II nursing. Becker mines the power of folk healing and modern medicine, reflecting on the fragile beauty of preserving humanity.
Through both timelines, there is a deep regard for the work nurses do. The novel’s dedication sets this tone, calling nurses “the unsung heroes who stand in the light and darkness, who carry life and death in their hands.” While it was set pre-COVID-19 pandemic, the novel is a much-deserved love letter to nurses and the collective trauma they’ve historically carried. The narrative feels even more pressing given how nurses were at the frontlines of the pandemic, caring for people of all backgrounds and creeds against insurmountable stress.
Readers who have ever had to make the impossible decision to let a loved one go will likely find The Moonlight Healers to be a bittersweet, embracing read. Its language is lush and sentimental. Like the orchard it’s backdropped by, the prose is not piercing but languid and gentle, all while making astute observations about the bookends of every human’s journey.
FICTION The Moonlight Healers
By Elizabeth Becker
Graydon House Books
Published February 11, 2025
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