The Orphan Collector by Ellen Marie Wiseman

Available on Amazon

Rating (1-5) - 📘📘📘📘📘
Genre - Fiction, World War, Historical Fiction, Coming of Age
Format - Paperback
Length - 304 Pages

*Amazon Blurb*

In the fall of 1918, thirteen-year-old German immigrant Pia Lange longs to be far from Philadelphia’s overcrowded slums and the anti-immigrant sentiment that compelled her father to enlist in the U.S. Army. But as her city celebrates the end of war, an even more urgent threat arrives: the Spanish flu. Funeral crepe and quarantine signs appear on doors as victims drop dead in the streets and desperate survivors wear white masks to ward off illness. When food runs out in the cramped tenement she calls home, Pia must venture alone into the quarantined city in search of supplies, leaving her baby brothers behind. 

Bernice Groves has become lost in grief and bitterness since her baby died from the Spanish flu. Watching Pia leave her brothers alone, Bernice makes a shocking, life-altering decision. It becomes her sinister mission to tear families apart when they’re at their most vulnerable, planning to transform the city’s orphans and immigrant children into what she feels are “true Americans.” 

Waking in a makeshift hospital days after collapsing in the street, Pia is frantic to return home. Instead, she is taken to St. Vincent’s Orphan Asylum – the first step in a long and arduous journey. As Bernice plots to keep the truth hidden at any cost in the months and years that follow, Pia must confront her own shame and fear, risking everything to see justice – and love – triumph at last. Powerful, harrowing, and ultimately exultant, The Orphan Collector is a story of love, resilience, and the lengths we will go to protect those who need us most.

 

*My Review* 

 

Another book that was read for my book club and finally a book that I can get excited about reviewing!

I think it's hard to write reviews when you get stuck in a rut and read a lot of books you don't enjoy. Ellen Marie Wiseman was the author who got my love of reading started as an adult with her book What She Left Behind.

The name of the book, The Orphan Collector, gave me a different view of what I thought the book would be about. I'm not saying it was bad at all, since I really enjoyed this one. I was simply thinking of it in a different light I guess you could say. I can't imagine being anyone who lived during a war. The unimaginable things that they witness or are a part of is just too much to think about. I feel so helpless for them. It's no different for me reading a boo even though it's fiction. A great book makes you feel for the characters and I couldn't have felt more sympathetic for poor Pia. Imagine your whole family being taken from you and no one will listen and help you!!

Of course a good book has to have it's villain, right? Bernice couldn't have fit this position any better. Reading from her point of view made me want to reach into the book and beat her. The things she did are beyond horrible.