Back in 1994, I watched a made for TV movie about the Dionne quintuplets: identical little girls born in 1934 to a poor farmer and his wife in rural Canada. It was a miracle the girls survived, and they became a worldwide sensation. Shelley Wood's fictionalized account of the sisters tells their story through the eyes of Emma, who dreams of being an artist, but her parents encourage her to find more stable work as a midwife apprentice. The very first birth young Emma assists with is the Dionne girls, and she ends up staying with them as their nurse all the way up until their fifth birthday. The girls were taken from their parents and moved across the street to a newly built nursery and hospital, and from that point on their upbringing was supervised by their physician, Dr. Dafoe, and a team of nurses and teachers. The girls were paraded out for the hordes of sightseers to ogle. Emma is torn because she just wants to protect the girls and give them a normal life, but really, how normal a life could the most famous girls in the world possibly have? It was a great book, I couldn't put it down, although the ending was very, very sad.
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