Truly loved this book, from beginning to end. As a retired Nurse Practitioner, I am very familiar with hospitals but really didn't know how tragic it all was during the Covid pandemic. Griggs did an excellent job of describing in detail all her experiences as an MD in a very busy NY hospital. Thank you NetGalley for this ebook for preview; highly recommend to all who went thru this tragic pandemic.

Covid-19 still wreaks havoc around the world but we are now seeing the first post-pandemic literature being written. The Sky Was Falling is an account of the beginning months of the epidemic in a New York hospital, written by pediatric surgeon Dr. Cornelia Griggs.

The memoir is told in diary form, allowing the reader to relive the shock, tension, fear, panic, and general angst that we all felt during the initial onslaught of the virus. That can be painful, but also cathartic. Griggs is quick to show the seriousness of the situation as well as the compassion, strength and humor shown by those on the front lines. As a country, we were not well-prepared for what we faced, but face it we did. And no one did so with more aplomb than the heroes who worked night and day to save lives in our hospitals.

This was a thoughtful and hope-filled read. I appreciated the author's openness in detailing how the pandemic impacted her own family and not just her work environment. I do think the book would have been stronger if Griggs had extended the timeline to the present day and shared more about the healthcare industry's recovery and preparation for the next wave or virus to come.

Any reader with a penchant for memoirs and/or the healthcare field would enjoy this book.

Thank you to Gallery Books and NetGalley for an advance digital copy in return for an honest review.

A hard book to read but one that I recommend. Griggs memoir examines the COVID 19 pandemic from the point of view of a doctor with young children living in NYC. Seeing how the doctors and nurses dealt with a pandemic while having little to no guidance was hard to read and made me think back to the uncertainty of that time.

Although this book was hard to read, I still recommend it. It was beautifully written, and it gave me a greater understanding of what the first year of the pandemic was like from inside the medical profession.

The Sky Is Falling is a riveting and important book. Cornelia Griggs, an accomplished pediatric surgeon and an equally accomplished writer, documents the first few months of COVID that coincided with the final term of her pediatric surgical training at a major New York City hospital. Although at times the manuscript reads as a little boastful, it recounts the struggles of a young woman who is dedicated to saving the most fragile of lives while raising two young children, separated by distance from her surgeon husband who is waiting for his family to join him soon in Boston, where they reside today. Her book is a paean to the brave health care workers - the nurses, doctors, janitorial staff, and more - who continued to care for the perilously sick with dwindling resources and overwhelming sadness and despair despite the risks to themselves and their own loved ones. The book is also an indictment of our many societal challenges and, most of all, of our health care system. "We are living in a broken system with a virus that crippled our ability to deliver care....It will take decades to really know what the full public health impact of this pandemic really is." The Sky Is Falling should be required reading for everyone concerned about this critically important issue.

A really good read about all that an intern went through during Covid 19. The author was so raw and real about her family life and work life. She shared many details that now make sense of what all was happening during the pandemic. She is totally honest about her feelings and her kids. I feel we all should read books to learn so that if it ever occurs again we can be better prepared.

Thanks so much to NetGalley and the publisher for the ARC of this book.
Well, are we all ready for Covid books yet? I don't know if I am, but this one seems pretty valuable to me. It is written by a pediatric surgeon who lived through the first terrible phase of the Covid epidemic in New York City, separated from her family and trying to cope along with all the other medical professionals she knows. And it was clearly a wrenching experience. Dr. Griggs also got involved in advocating on social media for PPE for health providers and for taking the epidemic seriously. She is clearly a very privileged person in this respect--she had media connections as her mother had been an editor at the New York Times; she had her mother and her nanny to take care of her children outside the city during her work in the epidemic. She recognizes this in her writing. But she also does not pussyfoot around about how terribly difficult the pandemic was for her and her colleagues.

It seems practically like another and distant past when we were so worried about Covid and what it really was and could do. Nowadays we are numb to the very real threat that Covid was in those early days. So it is important that we don't forget or gloss over this period in history. Dr. Griggs was wise enough to realize--in the moment--how important it would be to record her experiences and now we have them in the form of this book.
The book itself captures both the reality and the fears of that period in New York City. It is a book that should be read by public health officials and the public itself because we need to learn from the past. It reads smoothly and is actually hard to put down. I wonder what my grandchildren in years to come will think when they read this book. I am glad that it exists so that they might know what was happening during those days when they were home from school.

Thank you to NetGalley for an advance copy of this book. It's an important one!

How does a pediatric surgeon, wife and mother of two, in her last three months of a surgical fellowship at a major New York City hospital, cope with the unimaginable onslaught of the Covid pandemic. Her children are relocated to her parents countryside home, her husband is working at a Boston hospital and she is putting in 18 hour days, dealing with a shortage of equipment and protective gear, while patients die every few minutes. In this riveting memoir, Dr. Griggs gives the reader an inside look of the harrowing experience of the overworked, and often underpaid, health care workers who sacrificed much to the demands and mismanagement that characterized the early days of the pandemic.

I thoroughly enjoyed this book. Corniela is a pediatric surgery fellow in New York City in the last of nine rewarding, demanding, and exhilarating years of training. As she was eagerly awaiting her graduation ceremony and spending consistent time with her husband and two toddlers, COVID-19 came roaring into the city.

The Sky Was Falling is her day-by-day account of the staggering case numbers, dwindling respirator supply, and lack of clarity on how to treat this new disease. Harrowing and deeply personal, it reads like an all-too-real white-knuckle thriller and describes how healthcare professionals went beyond what they thought they could to heal their patients and themselves. Highly recommend.

This is a devastating very real story about the COVID crisis. It is too medical for me but I can imagine that others cannot put it down. It is a page turner, but I couldn’t finish it.

Reading this book by Dr. Cornelia Griggs brought back so many memories of the early days of Covid and how all our lives dramatically changed overnight. What we all thought would be a short minor inconvenience and then what happened next scared all of us. It made us think about our lives and how we took so many things for granted. This first person look into one of the hardest hit urban areas in the country was heartbreaking. The men and women who were at the front lines of the pandemic were hero's. This book takes us into that world.

Such a well written, heartfelt examination of the healthcare system's shortcomings during the early days of Covid 19. The author, Dr Cornelia Griggs, is a wife, a mother of 2 young children and entering her final year as a pediatric surgeon fellow when the pandemic arrives at her hospital in New York City.and she is confronted with frustration (no PPE), fear, and no real clarity on the treatment or procedures. Fortunately, she kept a diary...the book title is based on an op-ed Dr Griggs wrote for the New York Times in March 2020. This book is a must read and gives us the personal stories of the front line healthcare professionals who should all be celebrated!

A covid view from the front lines of NYC hospitals. It was real, raw, and sensitive. While a heavy read, it's an important one

What a powerful memoir! It covers the first few months of the COVID pandemic from the perspective of a Pediatric Surgery Fellow at one of the busiest NYC hospitals. A sad but also inspiring look into the workings of a hospital during the unprecedented and staggering caseload of what we now know as COVID. Clearly, this writing was cathartic for Griggs but also a window for us into the grueling decade of training and work to become a medical doctor, the endless pressure, the passion that inspires her to slog on... a great read that is hard to put down.

Dr. Griggs' beautifully written account of the COVID pandemic is harrowing, captivating and inspiring. I was so enthralled with her experiences that I devoured the entire book in one sitting. Dr. Griggs was finishing her pediatric surgery residency in New York City in the spring of 2020 when the COVID pandemic up-ended the city. In addition to rigorous medical training, Dr. Griggs was also navigating parenting two toddlers while her husband was a physician in a different city. During this time, Dr. Griggs kept a journal and was active on social media documenting the realities of the emergency room and intensive care unit in New York City.

There are so many things that I loved about this book. As a working parent, I was moved by Dr. Griggs' dedication to her young children and the challenging decisions that she made to keep her family safe. In many instances in the book she highlights the very important role that nurses play in front line health care with great appreciation. Additionally, Dr. Griggs covers the important socio-political backdrop of 2020 in a very authentic way recognizing the disproportionate impact the pandemic has had on communities of color. After the pandemic Dr. Griggs pursued additional training in public health. She is early in her career and I am excited to see how she continues to serve her patients and the community.

I highly recommend this book for anyone looking for an inspirational story.

Thank you to NetGalley and Gallery Books for the opportunity to read the advanced reader copy of this manuscript in exchange for an honest review.

I clearly remember reading Dr. Griggs' Op/Ed in the New York Times early in the pandemic and was keen to read this expanded version of her experience on the frontlines of the pandemic in a New York City hospital. Griggs, a pediatric surgeon, was in the last year of her decade-long training, when Covid overtook her hospital. While some of what Griggs recalls will be familiar to anyone paying attention (lack of PPE, exceedingly sick adults and kids, the sheer terror of the unknown), The Sky is Falling offers an incomparable and intelligent compendium in real time of what happened during the first six atrocious months of 2020. Griggs layers her unique perspective as a pediatric surgeon with her insights as a medical trainee during the crisis, as a mom of two young kids whom she parked with her folks in another state, as a spouse of a surgeon who himself was recovering from an illness and living in Boston, and as an ally to the social movements that occurred in the spring of 2020 as well. Highly recommend for readers of medical non-fiction and memoirs. Thank you to NetGalley and Gallery books for E-ARC