The Orphan Collector

Summary

Ellen Marie Wiseman, acclaimed author of What She Left Behind and The Life She Was Given, weaves thestories of two very different women into a page-turning novel as suspenseful as it is poignant, set amid one ofhistory’s deadliest pandemics.In the fall of 1918, thirteen-year-old German immigrant Pia Lange longs to be far from Philadelphia’s overcrowdedstreets and slums, and from the anti-German sentiment that compelled her father to enlist in the U.S. Army, hopingto prove his loyalty. But an even more urgent threat has arrived. Spanish influenza is spreading through the city. Soon,dead and dying are everywhere. With no food at home, Pia must venture out in search of supplies, leaving her infanttwin brothers alone …Since her baby died days ago, Bernice Groves has been lost in grief and bitterness. If doctors hadn’t been so busytending to hordes of immigrants, perhaps they could have saved her son. When Bernice sees Pia leaving her tenementacross the way, she is buoyed by a shocking, life-altering decision that leads her on a sinister mission: to transform thecity’s orphans and immigrant children into what she feels are “true Americans.”As Pia navigates the city’s somber neighborhoods, she cannot know that her brothers won’t be home when shereturns. And it will be a long and arduous journey to learn what happened—even as Bernice plots to keep the truthhidden at any cost. Only with persistence, and the courage to face her own shame and fear, will Pia put the piecestogether and find the strength to risk everything to see justice at last.