givebooksgirl reviewed on
Helpful Score: 3
Miller gets into the internal mindset of the two women in this story in a unique way. Catherine (a twice married woman in her 50's with grown children) returns to her grandmother's (Georgia) home and finds her diary. We learn about Georgia through her diary entries and I am thankful for Miller's gift of weaving the alternating storylines into my own heart. Georgia, who was diagnosed with tuberculosis as a teen, is the character I am most interested in. Her life-altering experience in the "san" often left me wishing I would've asked my own grandmother more questions about her older sister who was diagnosed with TB in the 1940s and "was sent away to the san" too. I greedily found myself researching the two sanitariums in my own state of Michigan (Battle Creek and Traverse City had sanitariums in the 1880s) and tried to imagine what life was was like for my great-aunt who went to the Battle Creek sanitarium. I know my own grandmother took her sister's child and raised him for the three years she was in the san. My grandmother talked about her sister's absence with great sadness. She didn't reveal too much (it seems many people from her generation who suffered greatly didn't talk about it but "got on with their lives.") Georgia endured, sacrificed but always remembered. The rich, emotional depth of "The World Below" caused me to shed tears for everyone sentenced to time at a santitarium -- then and now.
