Completely unbelievable, heartbreaking story.
I have only read 60 pages of this The Orphan Collector and am completely undone. If I had read this 6 months ago I would have thought what a terrible, terrible time! What a terrifying moment in history that I knew next to nothing about! This depiction of the Spanish Flu pandemic of 1918 is unimaginable! Except it’s not. Not anymore. The author writes with such descriptions of this time. You can smell the fear, the panic, the hopelessness and your heart hurts for Finn and Pia and Mutti and the twins and all the others. I felt the panic in my chest of not being able to help a beloved child, to keep them from dying!
The story draws a strangely parallel story as to what is happening currently in our world. It seems we could have learned a tremendous amount from the last pandemic. Ellen Wiseman allows us to see with eyes wide open that we have been looking away and thinking, that can’t happen now, everything is different, more modern, we’re smarter, we’ve all the doctors and nurses we could ever need! Except it did.
The story draws a strangely parallel story as to what is happening currently in our world. It seems we could have learned a tremendous amount from the last pandemic. Ellen Wiseman allows us to see with eyes wide open that we have been looking away and thinking, that can’t happen now, everything is different, more modern, we’re smarter, we’ve all the doctors and nurses we could ever need! Except it did.