Combining biography, politics, social history, and consummate storytelling, Nightingales is a dazzling portrait of an amazing woman, her difficult but loving family, and the high Victorian era they so perfectly epitomized. [Ballantine Books]
Critic Reviews
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Outstanding
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Booklist Bryce Christiansen
Informing careful scholarship with imaginative insight, a distinguished biographer brings to life the entire gifted but perplexing Nightingale family. [July 2004, p.1808]
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Outstanding
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Boston Globe Judith Maas
By the time we finish reading Gill's work, we fully share her fascination with this formidable and enigmatic woman.
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Outstanding
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Christian Science Monitor Ruth Johnstone Wales
Gracefully written, Gill's account of her complex and contradictory subject flows well, despite its density of detail. The chapters describing the Crimean War and Nightingale's work are riveting. Flo receives the fine care she deserves here.
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Outstanding
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Publishers Weekly
The book is expansive, richly detailed, generous to a fault; Gill's skills may well set a new standard for the novelistic mode of biography.
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Outstanding
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San Francisco Chronicle Zac Unger
Nightingales is surely destined to become the definitive biography of this remarkable woman. Moreover, the book manages to achieve a rare historian's trifecta: Not only is it painstakingly thorough and free of intrusive modern agendas, but it is also compellingly written, brisk and engaging enough to be read like fiction.
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Outstanding
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The New York Times Book Review Miranda Seymour
Gill does honor to her subject while providing a vivid and compellingly readable account of the family whose loyal support was crucial to her achievement.
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Outstanding
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Entertainment Weekly Lisa Schwarzbaum
The plural form of Nightingale is key to the innovation of this marvelous and engrossing study.
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Favorable
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Kirkus Reviews
The leisurely paced narrative occasionally bogs down in extraneous detail, but it masterfully illuminates crucial background elements, including the family's Unitarian tradition of political radicalism and the inheritance laws that made suitable matrimonial matches a necessity for the Nightingale girls.
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Favorable
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Library Journal Theresa McDevitt
An informative and highly readable portrait of a charismatic if flawed woman and the well-connected family that at first stifled but ultimately fueled her public work. [July 2004, p.92]
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Favorable
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Washington Post Stanley Weintraub
After [an] unpromising beginning, the soap-opera stuff drops away, and the biography becomes compelling indeed...Florence Nightingale and her extended family are evoked so vividly that we are drawn into the colorful, cultivated, class-ridden world in which they were thwarted, and thrived.
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Favorable
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Daily Telegraph Anne Chisholm
It is Gill's considerable achievement that by the time, halfway through the book, her heroine starts on the work for which she is remembered, the reader has come to understand how her character, connections and experiences enabled her to change her life and revolutionise the care of the sick.
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Favorable
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Daily Telegraph Charlotte Moore
Nightingale's many talents included a tremendous way with words. Gill's prose doesn't do justice to her subject: she has a weakness for cliche and jargon... [but s]he provides a valuable insight into the Victorian who has had more influence than any other on the way we live now.
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