Our score
Excellent
The Survivors Guild
Gabriella Saab's The Survivors Guild opens with the Titanic sinking, then spends most of its pages on what survival actually costs afterward: a Lebanese immigrant and a Manhattan heiress take charge of an unclaimed infant together and build an unlikely friendship across a class divide neither one chose. This historical fiction treats the disaster as a beginning, not a finale.
From the review
Bea Nohra boards the Titanic already counting the wages she'll need to bring her family over from Lebanon. Marguerite Ashby boards it sailing home to celebrate an engagement to a lord she doesn't love. When the ship goes down, Bea saves Marguerite's life, and the two of them come out of the disaster responsible for a baby boy nobody steps forward to claim. Gabriella Saab spends the rest of The Survivors Guild on the fallout: what two women with nothing in common owe a child, and each other, once the rescue ships have docked. The committee they found afterward, the Survivors Guild of the title, starts as a practical fix: someone has to feed this baby and find out where he belongs, and the two women are the ones stuck holding him. It becomes something else for both of them fast. For Bea, a Lebanese immigrant with family still waiting on money and passage, the guild is the one foothold she has in a country still working out what to make of her; every month the baby's relatives stay unfound is a month she keeps her job and her income. For Marguerite, charity work is armor. If New York's parlors admire her for the Survivors Guild, her parents lose their best argument for marrying her off to a lord she's polite to and nothing more. Saab alternates the two women's voices chapter by chapter, and the split works because their stakes in the same project point in almost opposite directions.
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