Pauline Bright has just lost her son, and is in need of a change. When her husband’s uncle offers to let him become a partner in his funeral business, she jumps at the chance to leave their small town and transplant her three girls to Philadelphia with its distracting bustle. But moving to above a funeral parlor does not provide the distance to death she had hoped and soon after, her husband is drafted. Life is muted and the loss of lives due to the war is ever present in Evelyn, Maggie, Willa and Pauline’s minds when suddenly a more pressing threat closer to home emerges, the Spanish flu. Attacking the healthy instead of the old or very young, the flu rips through the city, robbing every household and making the funeral business balloon out of control with excess bodies. One day, while accompanying Pauline to bring food to the sick, Maggie finds a young baby, his mother dead from the flu and when no one reports looking for him, the Bright sisters and Pauline elect to keep him. As the flu continues to take from everyone around them, this baby gives them all a purpose to hold to in an increasingly upturned world.
Susan Meissner’s work, As Bright as Heaven, is heartbreakingly poignant, presenting a single ray of hope in the midst of War and sickness that crystallizes and refracts from within the Bright household. Told from the points of view of the three sisters and their mother, Pauline, the bond between the women through tragedy is reminiscent of Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women, but set forward 50 years. Meissner deals with a lesser known area of history in the Spanish flu despite its devastating death toll. A beautiful tale of hope and loss, family and love.
Susan Meissner’s work, As Bright as Heaven, is heartbreakingly poignant, presenting a single ray of hope in the midst of War and sickness that crystallizes and refracts from within the Bright household. Told from the points of view of the three sisters and their mother, Pauline, the bond between the women through tragedy is reminiscent of Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women, but set forward 50 years. Meissner deals with a lesser known area of history in the Spanish flu despite its devastating death toll. A beautiful tale of hope and loss, family and love.