Bestest Friend and I are doing a blog project. Each day we will write a blog post on a pre-determined theme chosen by a random noun generator. The theme for the tenth day of the month is "Judgment." I have personally decided that I will pass judgment on a book on the tenth day of each month.
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I don't know how I heard about As Bright As Heaven by Susan Meissner. I didn't write it down. Why don't I write these things down? For the second time this week, if it was you, thank you for your recommendation!
In this historical fiction novel, the Bright family moves to Philadelphia in 1918 from their rural tobacco farm so that the father can join his uncle in a mortuary business. The family consists of the father Thomas, the mother Pauline, and three girls: Evelyn, Maggie, and Willa. They had just lost an infant son and the first part of the book is a meditation on the grief of a life that could have been.
But once they get to Philadelphia, things start to get real. Soldiers are heading off to war and then the Spanish flu hits and the Bright family, as the mortuary owners, have a lot on their plates. Meanwhile, while bringing soup to some people infected with the flu, Maggie stumbles upon a baby whose mother is dead and she brings the baby home to care for it.
What a real gem this book is. I was not certain that I was really up for a pandemic storyline, but I thought this was really well done. The books switches POV among the mother and three daughters every chapter and I had some challenges keeping track of the characters at first, but once they got to Philadelphia, it was a lot easier. The family was just so real. There were some brilliant moments of kind, generous parenting. The daughters were interesting, complicated individuals with interests, who make mistakes, and learn from them.
I think if you're still traumatized from the COVID pandemic, this might not be great literature for you at this time, but if you think you have enough distance or think the 1918 flu epidemic was a different enough situation, I think this is worth a read.
4.5/5 stars
Lines of note:
...asking my sister for help is like asking to be stung by bees. (page 56)
I keep track of animal analogies. This was interesting.
...grief is such a strange guest, making its home in a person like it's a new thing that no one has ever experienced before. It is different for every person. (page 70)
I think this all the time. All of us have or will grieve, but we all act like we're the first ones to face sorrow. I guess that's the human condition.
Most people have masks on; a few don't. Some stores we pass are open; some aren't. Some doors have red-lettered placards that read INFLUENZA tacked to them - which means there is flu inside - some don't. Some doors have crepe banners tacked to them - white if a child died, black if it was an adult, and gray if it was an old person whom the flu had killed - and some don't. It is like any other day, except it isn't. (page 108-109)
I'm so glad we didn't take up the crepe paper banners for COVID. That would have been beyond depressing.
...so many others are off fighting in a war where more people are dying, but not from influenza - from mortar rounds and mustard gas and bullets. It is like there are two wars. And what does war even accomplish? How does one country win over another simply by killing its people? None of it makes any sense. (page 126)
This book definitely put COVID into perspective. At least we weren't fighting a global war at the same time.
Home isn't a place where everything stays the same; it's a place where you are safe and loved despite nothing staying the same. Change always happens. (page 225)
Whoever had the library book I had before me underlined this passage. It was the ONLY mark in the whole book, so I felt like I had to share it.
Appearances of the word hat:
Uncle Walt told Papa that he needed to buy a nice, new tape measure - at least six feet - and a long black coat and hat. (page 12-13)
When people start to put on their hats to go...(page 65)
...tipping his hat to me...
Then I took the hat pin to my room. (page 222 - this same hat pin appears again on page 383)
Look at you go with all the hat references.
ReplyDeleteAlso, one random underline in a library book always thrills me. I don't mark up library books but I have *gasp* dog-eared a few pages in my day. I know, the shame. But still...finding a small passage underlined or a little slip of paper with quotes from the book etc just always feels a bit like finding hidden treasure.
I will not stop with the hat references. We'll see how long before it becomes *old hat* for me. (Ha ha ha. I am really cracking myself up over here.) I'll probably continue finding hats in books until at least this blogging every day project is done because I keep thinking the references will give me inspiration for those posts on the first day of the month. But then it will just be a habit for me. Hats FOREVER.
DeleteFor a period of a year, I lived in a small town in Minnesota where the librarians would occasionally put a blank bookplate in the front of some books and people could write their thoughts about the book on it. I LOVED this feature of the library. I knew wrote a post about it back then and here it is: https://ngradstudent.blogspot.com/2011/10/beekeepers-apprentice.html
I read this book a year or so ago, so maybe you learned about it from me?! I really liked this book, too, and found it so interesting to read how the 1918 pandemic was handled. Some of the scenes were so difficult, especially from the perspective of morgue workers.
ReplyDeleteInteresting. I just looked up your review from April 2021 and there's no way I would have thought it was a good fit for me at that time! A couple of years later and now I can handle it, but I think I would have passed immediately back then. (Also. I actually thought the first part of the novel was slow which is the exact opposite of you! Even though we both liked this book, we're still disagreeing!)
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