The Quintland Sisters audiobook

5+ stars! Heartwarming and heartbreaking emotion. Brilliant and beautiful narration. Shocking and unforgettable detail.This story is a stunning look into the lives of the world’s first quintuplets born in Callander, Ontario, Canada in 1934. Yvonne, Annette, Cecile, Marie and Emilie Dionne shock their parents and the attending doctor and midwives on the day of their birth – five babies instead of one!?!? So tiny and frail, they are not expected to survive the night of their birth.Emma Trimpany is seventeen-years-old when she accepts the request to accompany and assist the local midwife in attending a birth at the rundown Dionne farmhouse. This single decision changes her life forever, leaving her heart with a permanent longing and attachment to these five babies. Days after their birth, in the confines of the rickety old farmhouse, the Dionnes’ learn that the government has decided to remove the quintuplets from their poverty-stricken parents, making them wards of the British king. Guardians are appointed and the babies are moved to a custom-built, sterile hospital to keep them safe and properly cared for by full time doctors and nurses. The quintuplets attain instant worldwide fame becoming a destination for six-thousand visitors per day in their custom-made playground observatory at the hospital. Through many ups and downs, Emma spends the next several years of her life dedicated to these five little girls who each uniquely own a piece of her heart. This novel is skillfully narrated through journal entries, letter correspondence and newspaper articles. Readers get to experience the childhood of the “Quints” through the eyes of Emma, an endearing, vulnerable and truly unforgettable character who I absolutely loved and was hopeful for. I was completely drawn into this story from the first few pages and my astonishment didn’t falter even after I finished the last sentence. The author, Shelley Wood, does an outstanding job weaving fact and fiction, keeping the reader dedicated and emotionally connected to the characters and the outcome. The Epilogue was exquisite, although not at all what I had expected. It left some things unanswered which was brilliant as it enticed me to do some research of my own. I am eager to investigate further into the story of the Dionne quintuplets and how the government stepped in to control their precious lives. This reading experience has left me baffled and curious in the best of ways – this is a true testament to phenomenal writing and storytelling. A truly remarkable novel!I loved every single chapter, page, paragraph, sentence and word of this endearing story. This easily takes top spot of my 2019 Favourites List! Needless to say, I HIGHLY recommend!Thank you to HarperCollins for gifting me a physical copy to read and review!To find this review, along with a look into my Author Series event where I met this lovely author, please visit our blog at: https://twosisterslostinacoulee.com/2...The Quintland Sisters is AVAILABLE NOW!

Emma is seventeen and dreams about being an artist. Her parents, however, wish she has a more practical career and arrange for her to have an apprenticeship with the midwife. One night, she is called to help with a delivery in the Dionne farmhouse. Matters turn dramatic when five tiny baby girls are born premature. These babies require round-the-clock care as their health is fragile. Emma falls in love with the quintuplets and signs on as a nurse as they defy the odds and survive. As the quintuplets garner international attention, Emma needs to define where her place is. Another great historical fiction book! The Quintland Sisters is a heartwrenching, compelling, thoughtful and intruguing story about the birth and consecutive treatemnt of the first identical quintuplets to live to adulthood. Emma loves painting but has to work with the midwife to learn practical skills. Attending the birth of the quintuplets alters the path of her life. Instead of art, she goes into nursing. This allows her to stay on with the girls she has fallen in love with. Surviving being born premature, the girls are hailed a miracle and many flock to see them. Emma does her best to care and safeguard the girls but feels many may have ulterior motives to attending to them. As their fame increases, Emma falls more into the background until she finds her own voice. Told through diary entries, newspaper articles and letters, the narrative was moving and touching. The pace complimented the tone of the narrative. Characterization was strong showcasing that a character could be complex, being both at ally and an adversary to the girls. I liked the parallels between Emma struggling to to find her identity and that of the quintuplets' (individual identities) being aslomost supressed. greatly enjoyed this book.The Dionne quintuplets (Yvonne, Annette, Cecilie, Marie and Emilie) were the first quintuplets to survive beyond infancy (in a time before artificial insemination). Born in Collander, Ontario (in 1934) their birth cause quite a shock. Early on, custody was removed from the parents (that alredy had five other children) under the guise that they had neither the money or knowledge to properly care for the girls. The Dionne Quintuplet Guardianship Act was established in 1935. with Oliva Dionne (their father) as one of the four guardians. Soon a hospital and nursery was built across the street from the Dionne farmhouse exclusively for the quintuplets. In a short time, this place was called Quintland and as much as 3,000 people visited per day. The girls could be observed while playing in their outdoor playground. Quintland generated about 500 million dollars in tourism revenue. In addition, the girls' image was used to promote a variety of products and also appeared on film severa times. Meanwhile, the girls were unaware that they were being exploited for financial gain. It is worth to mention that the girls were born amid the Great Depression and their exhibition helped boost their small town economy sustancially (not that that makes it right that they were used). Its clear now that not one of the guardians truly had the girls' best interest at heart. By the time they were "off" display, a chance for a normal life seemed complicated. This is a story of triumph but also of sorrow. These girls lacked for nothing but were robbed the chance of having any sense of normalcy. Souvenir shop outside Quintland. Image from Quintland.com

I had never heard of the Dionne Quintuplets until this book. I did some research and reading up on these famous sisters after reading this book. There was not a lot of details on the sisters and thus for what little details there were, I thought author, Shelley Wood did a good job with this book. It helped explain why there was not a lot of details spent on the sisters in this book. That was one factor that had left me craving more. I wanted to get to know more about each sister and their personalities. For this, I looked to Emma. She was the voice/narrator of this book. What a great narrator she was. She had a good voice and a nice wealth of knowledge about what it was like caring for the quintuplets. Ms. Wood really did transport me back in time. She is a good storyteller. This combined with Emma's voice, it was like I was Emma experiencing everything as she did. You have to make sure that The Quintland Sisters by Shelley Wood is on your reading list for 2019.

This was a fiction story of he Dionne quintuples born in 1934, I have read several books and articles about the quints and have always been interested in them. This story was told from the point of view of an untrained girl who started helping with the quints because her mother wanted her to be a midwife. She talks about the daily routines and how no one was seeing the girls as little girls but more as test cases. She also was cut off from what was going on in the world since they were kept separate from the world. I had planned on giving the book 5 stars but something she wrote about in the last few chapters spoiled the story.

"The Quintland Sisters" tells the story of the Dionne quintuplets, a famous set of siblings born in Canada in the 1930s. While quintuplets are still not common, they were really not common back then as this was well before the age of fertility interventions like IVF and the like. The Dionne sisters become celebrities of a sort almost from the time that they were born. They If you've followed my reviews or my blog for any length of time, you may know that I have twin girls. They are identical and we get a lot of attention when we go out. I can't begin to imagine what it would be like to have quintuplets and the uproar that it would still cause today. The Dionne family had people parking outside of their home waiting to catch a glimpse of the babies napping. Even from their earliest days, the Dionne sisters' lives are strange. I liked how the author was able to capture the uproar that constantly seems to thrum in the background of the girls' lives. I liked that the book was narrated by Emma, a nurse whose first taste of nursing comes from helping to deliver the Dionne girls. She loves these girls and is protective of them as much as she can be. I really enjoyed seeing things through her eyes. We see as the girls' lives are upended over and over again throughout the book. People like Emma become some of the only constants that they had.I felt so bad for the Dionne quintuplets throughout the book. You have to wonder what not having much of a childhood and constantly being on display must have been like. The book certainly gives us a taste of that and made for an enjoyable albeit sad read.

5 starsI was hooked from the very first page of this book and I had never even heard of this family. I, too, fell in love with the quints and felt like I was there in the nursery.

I had not heard about the Dionne Quintuplets before I read this book (which has caused me to be on Google a lot at the moment, lol). I thought this novel was well written and I think Shelley Wood is an excellent storyteller, I'm anxious to read anything else she writes. I love how this book is told in diary format. What these babies went through during the depression is very upsetting and tugged at my heart strings. I will definitely read some nonfiction about them soon.

As the author wrote in her notes at the end, "the brighter the spotlight, the darker the shadows." This was a fascinating look into the first five years of the Dionne quintuplets' lives from the perspective of a girl/young woman who unexpectedly becomes the lone constant in their lives. The book is fiction, but it is based on facts which have been collected and preserved by quint fans for decades - almost a century, really. Emma, the narrator, is naive by her own admission, and it is her search for clarification that shows the reader the dark and the light of what was happening to those five little girls and everyone around them. Her journey from a reluctant nurse to an adoring mother figure was sweet and believable, and it was because I grew so fond of Emma that I was disappointed at the ending of the book. It was done with such unexpected finality it was as if Ms Wood rushed to finish, leaving me breathless with a need for answers and closure. Emma did so much more in her life - her letters hint at it all - but I wanted to see her at least start out on that path, become what she eventually was. Having said that, the book overall was excellent reading, and I applaud Ms Wood for her unique and insightful approach to this wholly Canadian and yet internationally known story.

Shelley Wood decided to fictionalize the story of the Dionne quints, born two months early in 1934 in Canada, because she feared it was in danger of being forgotten and wanted to reach a wider audience than readers of non-fictional accounts. She did a wonderful job!Her narrator, Emma, is only 17 when she accompanies a local midwife to the Dionne farm, where a French grand multipara (a woman who has given birth 5 times or more before), is in premature labour. Emma isn't that keen on midwifery, she would much rather study art. Her parents want her to pursue a profession which offers more financial security, though, since her marriage prospects are uncertain due to a large birthmark on her cheek.Everyone present is astounded when Mrs Dionne gives birth to five minute girls who look remarkably similar. (Researchers later determined that they were identical!) Emma falls head over heels in love with them. She guards them in their "nest" next to the open stove, and hastily documents events in her notebook. She wants to record every detail before things change - no one expects them to live very long. She also sketches the strange-looking, fragile little humans.Miraculously, all five babies survive the night. As the news of their birth spreads, help starts pouring in from all over: nurses arrive, hospitals send donor breast milk and an incubator. Nevertheless things are touch and go for months. Amidst the uncertainty Mr Dionne, desperately worried about finances, signs a contract to move the girls to a fairground exhibit as soon as possible. Government officials step in and the girls become wards of the state. This is only the beginning of a decade-long financial and custodial tug-of-war between the Dionne parents, the state, and the country doctor who became famous for having delivered and cared for the world's first surviving quints.At the age of three months the babies, desperately ill with gastroenteritis, are moved to a specially built hospital across the road. Contact with their parents, not to mention their siblings, is severely restricted, and Emma becomes the closest thing the girls have to a mom, a source of normality in their exceedingly bizarre life. Tourists flock to the hospital to gawk at the girls. Researchers study the minutiae of their highly-regimented lives. They become a Canadian treasury, worldwide celebrities, and profitable commodities. Everyone wants a piece of them. They are sequestered in the nursery for five years, until they travel - on a designated train, no less - to Toronto to meet the king and queen.Meanwhile war clouds are gathering. Emma's doubts grow: she truly wants the best for the girls, but what does 'the best' mean? She doesn't want to abandon her darlings yet fears that she has been complicit in robbing them of a happier, more normal childhood. And what about her own fulfilment? Her dreams of attending art school are finally within reach; it is even possible that she is falling in love with a good man who feels the same way about her. Will fate deal her a better, less complicated hand than the Dionne family got?Emma is a sympathetic and memorable character. I savoured this bittersweet book and am eager to read Family Secrets, an autobiography by the surviving Dionne sisters.

The Quintland Sisters by Shelley Wood was a well written, informative and emotional book. I was not aware of the births, lives or history of the Quintland sisters so I found Shelley Wood's account of their story fascinating and intriguing. It was hard for me to put this book down since I was curious and emotionally involved about the outcomes of the five sisters. I loved the way Shelley Wood decided to tell the story about the quintuplets. The story about these five little, fragile sisters was told through the voice of Emma Trimpany, a young, seventeen year old, high school girl whose mother thought she might aspire to become a midwife with the right amount of training. Emma had a birthmark on one side of her face and her mother always believed a good profession would be advisable since she doubted Emma would ever marry. By fate, the night she accompanied the midwife to the Dionne farm was the night the quintuplets were born. It was 1934 in Northern Ontario, that Emma stood in awe and fright during the harrowing births of Yvonne, Annette, Cecile, Marie and Emilie. Emma was requested by Dr. Dafoe, the doctor who brought the little girls into this world, to remain and help care for the babies those first few crucial days. No one expected that all five babies would live but miraculously they did. Emma would become the single nurse who took care of the sisters the longest.Since this was the first set of living quintuplets, the government of Ontario stepped in and decided to make the sisters wards of the British king. Dr. Dafoe was still very concerned with the girls' health. With the support of the government, Dr. Dafoe and his team of nurses which now included Emma, took over the day-to-day care of the quintuplets. Their parents were banned from interacting or caring for the babies. As soon as the babies were deemed well enough they were removed from the Dionne farmhouse. The parents were french speaking, devout Catholics and displayed little or no warmth or love toward their existing other five children. The Dionne family was quite poor as well. In order to house the quintuplets properly, a brand new hospital was commissioned and built across the street from the Dionne farm. No expense was spared in raising and taking care of the little girls. Over the years, the girls became spectacles. An observation station was built, where over 6,000 visitors came to see the sisters while they played in their private playground. The little girls were unaware of the thousands of eyes that watched them. A new doctor , Dr. Blatz, joined the staff. The way he regarded the sisters was very upsetting. He saw them as experiments or "animals in a zoo". It was also upsetting how the Canadian government and advertising agencies exploited the girls and made so much money in doing so. Throughout the years, the Dionne's fought for custody of their children. M. Dionne was focused on the profits the girls were making and what part of that he was entitled to. The parent's occasional visits were confusing and at times scary for the little girls. The one thing the girls learned was that they could always count on the love and protection of the nurses.Emma loved each girl and saw each one as their own person with their own personalities and individual traits. She kept journals over the years documenting the girls progress and accomplishments, moments of mischief or of tenderness. Emma was also a very talented artist. She began to sketch and paint the girls and was compensated very handsomely for that as well. Emma had the girl's best interests foremost in her heart, though. She always asked if the girls' trust fund was sufficient to take care of them for the rest of their lives. The quintuplets always came first to Emma.The Quintland Sisters by Shelley Wood was a wonderful book. It was very well researched. She included many actual newspaper articles in the book that appeared throughout the years the quintuplets were growing up. I highly recommend this book.

I knew almost nothing about the Dionne Quintuplets before reading The Quintland Sisters, so I devoured this book as a novel, not as historical fact. I loved it—the mix of diary entries and newspaper articles (which I gather were real) made for a fascinating blend of fact and fiction and it made me, as a reader, have to do some of the work to fill in the gaps, which I always love in a book. The plot is fast and compelling, with a constant hint of foreboding, and the characters were beautifully drawn, with just enough details that I could fill in the rest, especially when it is obvious that Emma is judging people based on their looks or actions like a typical teenager. Emma is definitely an “unreliable narrator” or maybe more of a “naïve narrator”: watching her subtly change her impressions of who is doing the “right” thing by the quintuplets over the course of the novel felt, to me, to be very true to life. Her description of the birth at the beginning is exactly the kind of reaction I think any 17-year old girl would have, but by the end of the novel she has acquired a wisdom or at least an uncertainty about people and events that to me rang true. The climax of the book I did not see coming, but when I went back and re-read certain sections I realized that I was a bit like Emma, only seeing the things I wanted to see, caught up in my chosen story line. I, of course, went and googled as much as I could about the quintuplets after finishing the book and I was so sorry to hear what happened to them when they were finally reunited with their family. That happened some time after the period covered in the novel, but I can imagine how it must have influenced the author who would have wanted to find a way to hint at the future while only writing about the first five years. And then the world seemed to completely forget about them, which is a travesty. As a work of fiction, this is a fast and fascinating read and hopefully will inspire people to go out and learn more about their true story. Overall, I thought The Quintland Sisters was sometimes sad and upsetting, and at other times really sweet and beautiful, which seems to me an accurate echo of the real lives of the Dionne girls. I am recommending The Quintland Sisters to my book club as part of our 2019 line up, there is no doubt.