Readers and Writers: University of Minnesota grad writes twisty historical thriller, 'The Vines'

Mar. 27—North Brother Island is an eerie place in the East River almost at the doorstep of the Bronx.

It's a place with memories of death and loneliness, a 20-acre campus where Riverside Hospital once isolated mostly poor immigrants from New York City's unhealthy tenements who had communicable diseases such as measles, smallpox, leprosy, typhus, tuberculosis and yellow fever.

Today the buildings are abandoned and lush greenery is overtaking the island. North Brother is returning to nature as a federally-protected, off-limits bird sanctuary covered with vines slithering through broken walls and windows, wrapping around a rickety old operating table.

There couldn't be a more perfect setting for University of Minnesota grad Shelley Nolden's debut historical thriller, "The Vines" (Freiling Publishing, $26.99). Nolden, who lives near Milwaukee, Wis., has a full-time job on Wall Street, so she got up at 5 a.m. for four years to write before work.

"The Vines" is suspenseful and exciting, as the island becomes a stalking ground for Cora, who carries diseases in her body but is asymptomatic as long as she stays on the island where she and her sister were sent with measles in 1902.

Cora's unusual response to disease makes her a prime candidate for experimentation by four generations of surgeons in the Gettler family. The doctors, three of whom don't ask Cora's permission to abuse her body in the name of science, knew that the young woman had recovered from typhus and scarlet fever. Since then, they had been looking for the elusive immune-system-boosting chemical reagent they believed she'd ingested. If they found it, they could cure the family matriarch of Lyme disease, as well as being on the front lines of a cure if there was a pandemic.

Covered with scars all over her body from the surgeons' knives, Cora has lived on the island alone for more than 100 years (a touch of fantasy here). In 2007 she's discovered by Finn, urban explorer and descendent of the doctors who tormented her with blood draws and surgery. Finn, watching her bathe, sees her as "mutilated but so graceful." She's also smart and at home on the island, ready to take revenge on the whole Gettler family. She makes that clear to Finn when she throws sharp scalpels at him and briefly holds him prisoner. The last Gettler doctor to experiment on Cora is Kristian, who refers to Cora as "the mutt." But Kristian is not what he seems, and revelation of the Gettler family's century-old secrets changes all of them.

"When I wrote 'The Vines' I was still recovering from cancer, in a dark place in my life," said Nolden, who was diagnosed with leukemia in 2011 when she was 31. Now that she's in complete remission, she sees how her personal experiences influenced her book.

"When I was sick I had a difficult time dealing with the enemy being inside me," she said. "Your own body is turning against you and you are wanting the illness out. An island quarantine hospital lent itself to writing about a similar topic. I was in the medical system, being poked and prodded. One of the tremendously sad things during my illness was that I was 20 weeks pregnant and lost the baby. The sense of isolation in the book is common to anyone this past year, but especially to cancer patients in general. For 40 days I couldn't be with my family, hug my 18-month-old daughter. That intense feeling came through in my writing."

Nolden's book grew out of a cancer blog she kept during her illness, leading to her contributing to cancer-related publications and co-found GRYT Health, whose mission is to improve quality of life and increase survival for people facing cancer.

ADVOCACY FOR WOMEN

Nolden grew up in Brookdale, Wis., and her high school grades earned her an academic scholarship to the University of Minnesota where she was on the swimming, diving and rowing teams. After graduating in 2002 with a degree from the university's Carlson Business School, she is now a partner and Co-Head of Investor Relations for a New York-based Wall Street firm. She was so happy with her experiences at the university she donated her first "substantial" bonus to the rowing team's new facility and the locker room is named for her.

Years as a college athlete and a woman on male-dominated Wall Street helped Nolden develop a passion for advancement of women's rights by becoming an adviser to Goal Five, a women's sports apparel company named after the United Nations' Fifth Sustainable Development goal: Achieve gender equality and empower all women and girls.

Nolden's real-life advocacy for women also ties into her novel's theme of experimenting on Cora. The doctors believed they could hold her captive and do what they wished with her body because she was sacrificing for the common good.

"Cora is a metaphor not just for women, but for other disadvantaged populations that have been treated unfairly," Nolden says, including Henrietta Lacks, whose cancer cells were used without her permission, Black men used in the Tuskegee Study of Untreated Syphilis, and women prisoners who underwent horrific experiments by Nazis at the Dachau concentration camp. (One of the doctors in the novel participated in those experiments.)

DISCOVERING NORTH BROTHER ISLAND

Nolden married her husband, Rob, in 2007 and they have two daughters. Rob Nolden grew up in Minneapolis where his mother, DiAnne, lives. Shelley's parents are in Brookdale.

"It's the old house divided — Vikings vs. Packers," Shelley jokes of her cross-the-borders marriage.

The couple were returning home to New Jersey in 2014 from either Wisconsin or Minnesota when they flew over North Brother. "My husband elbowed me, pointed out the window and said, 'You should write a book about that island,' " Nolden recalls. "Without tree cover I could see the ruins and I was fascinated. When we landed I was Googling, trying to figure out what its name was. As soon as I saw 'quarantine facility,' I told Rob he was right."

Although Nolden wasn't allowed on the island, she was able to find plenty of historical material, including real-life people and events she incorporates into her novel. Mary Mallon, infamous "Typhoid Mary," died there, and it was the scene of a tragedy in 1904 when a tourist boat, the Gen Slocum, caught fire and took the lives of 1,100 people, mostly women and children.

"The problem was that pictures of the island online mostly didn't have the buildings labeled," Nolden said. "I needed a solid foundation in setting and how the island changed over time."

Later in 2014, photographer Christopher Payne published his book "North Brother Island: The Last Unknown Place in New York City" and Nolden had the information she needed to prompt her imagination about the buildings in which she could set scenes.

"Payne's book is fabulous." Nolden says. "Without it, mine would have been impossible to write. I got to know the buildings' architecture and various rooms. I meticulously examined over 450 photographs and cross-referenced them with Payne's labeled images. I gained a surreal visual of a microenvironment that experiences seismic changes over the course of a mere century. The novel opens with Cora showering in the bathroom in the staff house where the outer wall has crumbled away. There's an isolation room in the TB building and I imagined what conflict could happen there."

Nolden hopes people who have read her novel will do an internet search for Payne's images. "It will be a rewarding experience for them. They'll see images they recognize from scenes in the book," she says. (Nolden's website — shelleynolden.com — also has lots of information about North Brother Island, including additional resources such as articles, videos, photography and books.)

By the time the first news of COVID-19 broke out of China in December of 2019, Nolden had done a spreadsheet showing all the infectious diseases mentioned in her novel — how they spread, where outbreaks were. She was very concerned about this new disease.

"I ordered sanitizer, masks, convinced my mother to go to Costco and we filled entire carts with supplies in case there was an epidemic," she recalled. "My family thought this was nonsensical behavior but when they saw what happened they shifted from amusement to gratitude."

Nolden has begun a three-month leave of absence from her job to write the sequel to "The Vines." It's about a British frigate that sank in treacherous Hell Gate in the river in 1780, supposedly carrying payroll for British soldiers.

"Imagine. Golden guineas worth hundreds of millions of dollars today, still at the bottom of the East River near 8 million people," she says. "By the time this sequel is published, people will be ready to move on from COVID. It will be a lighter, more fun read."

AN ABBRIEVATED HISTORY OF NORTH BROTHER ISLAND

1881 — To address a growing smallpox epidemic, the New York Board of Health begins to move Riverside Hospital from Blackwell's Island to North Brother Island.

1885 — The new Riverside Hospital facility, designed to treat New York City's indigent ill, opens on North Brother.

Early 1900s — To combat fears of being sent to Riverside Hospital, which resulted in families hiding their sick from authorities, efforts are made to improve the facility's campus as well as its reputation.

1907 — The Department of Health gives Mary Mallon (Typhoid Mary), an asymptomatic carrier of Salmonella Typhi, a choice to have her gall bladder removed (where the bacteria were believed to reside) or be exiled to North Brother Island. She refuses the dangerous surgery and dies at Riverside Hospital in 1938 after being bedridden with a stroke since 1933.

Post World War II — Several of the larger buildings, including the Tuberculosis Pavilion, are repurposed as apartment buildings for students (and their families) who were studying at NYC colleges under the GI bill. A grocery store, cafeteria, library, and movie theater are added. After the families depart in the late 1940s the island is temporarily abandoned.

1952 — Riverside Hospital reopens as an experimental rehabilitation treatment center for heroin-addicted juveniles.

1963 — Riverside Hospital closes, all electricity, phone, and ferry service to the island discontinued.

1987 — New York City Audubon Society and the NYC Department of Environmental Conservation determines the island has become heavily populated by several species of colonial wading birds.

2001 — New York City Department of Recreation acquires the island and designates it a "Forever Wild" resource with no public access.

Hear the author

— What: Shelley Nolden virtually introduces "The Vines" in conversation with her editor, Benee Knauer, who also edited Sarah Pekkanen's and Greer Hendrick's bestsellers "The Wife Between Us" and "An Anonymous Girl."

— When: 7 p.m. Monday, May 10, presented by Next Chapter Booksellers.

— Information: Registration and details will be available at nextchapterbooksellers.com