Excerpt from The Love Elixir of Augusta Stern by Lynda Cohen Loigman, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

Every person within a half-mile radius of the corner of Sackman Street and Sutter Avenue knew Solomon Stern and Stern's Pharmacy. They sought his advice regarding every kind of ailment—from fevers, coughs, and constipation to insomnia and skin infections. They wandered into his shop from the delicatessen next door to ask what to take for their upset stomachs. They carried their screaming children to him directly from the playground down the block because he could disinfect a bloody knee with iodine faster than any doctor in town.

Not only was Augusta's father a skillful practitioner, he was also a thoughtful listener. To his customers, he was priest and rabbi, social worker and secret keeper. The precision with which he formulated his treatments—whether pills or powders, creams or tinctures—was lauded by everyone in the neighborhood. His medicines made everyone well.

Everyone except for Augusta's mother.

Irene Stern developed diabetes at the age of thirty-seven, when Augusta was only twelve years old. She saw all the specialists there were to see, but there was no medication available to help. When the doctor first made his diagnosis, Irene knew what lay ahead. She did not rail against her fate but set about making the two years she had left as pleasant as possible for her daughters. Even in her final weeks—starved to a bony, fragile shell—Irene was a calm and easy light, devoid of any bitterness. In the end, she simply floated away, like a blue balloon in a cloudless sky that, once set free, rises up, up, up until it vanishes entirely into the ether.

Augusta did not inherit her mother's patience or her predilection for acceptance. Her early upbringing among the boxes and bottles of her father's windowless prescription room had led her to believe that for every ailment, there was a certain cure. All it took was the proper formula and the right ingredients to concoct what was needed. In the wake of her mother's death, however, Augusta was forced for the first time to consider that medicine had its limitations. Her fourteen-year-old body vibrated with ceaseless outrage. How could she have been so misled?

And then, not long after Irene Stern passed, the first injection of a new diabetes medication called insulin was successfully administered to a boy in Canada. Before her mother was diagnosed, Augusta had never heard of diabetes. And now—now that her mother was lost—the newspapers were suddenly full of stories of people who had the same disease. Except that those people were being saved—not because they were smarter or more worthy, but simply because they had better timing. As it turned out, Augusta had not been misled. The scientists and doctors had simply been slow.

Augusta was happy the boy lived, of course, but as a motherless adolescent girl, she ached at the unfairness of it all. Irene Stern had been funny and kind. She had sung her daughters lullabies before bed every night. She had drawn them silly pictures and braided their hair. She had taken them to Coney Island to swim—instructing Bess, her elder daughter, to raise her arms high and reminding Augusta to lift her head and breathe. Irene continued to sing and braid and swim for as long as her body allowed, but in the end, she could not survive the storm her illness had become. Meanwhile, people like the Canadian boy skipped through the very same deluge as if it were barely a drizzle.

When Augusta fumed over the injustice, Bess reminded her of their mother's last moments. "Mama didn't want us to be angry," Bess said. "She would have been pleased that the drug was helping to make people well."

Augusta knew her sister was right, but that didn't make the articles any easier to read. Their father explained that insulin wasn't exactly a drug, but some sort of biological substance that their mother's body had failed to produce. Whatever it was, it was saving people's lives. Pharmacies like her father's did not stock it yet, but Solomon Stern assured his daughters that one day, very soon, they would.

Excerpted from The Love Elixir of Augusta Stern by Lynda Cohen Loigman. Copyright © 2024 by Lynda Cohen Loigman. Excerpted by permission of St. Martin's Press. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.