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librarysue 's review for:
The Orphan Collector
by Ellen Marie Wiseman
I read this for a book group and can’t fault the choice of the subject matter for timeliness: when better to read a novel about the 1918 Flu epidemic than during the current Coronavirus pandemic? But I don’t have to admire a piece of improbable melodrama populated by wooden characters. The author works hard to generate the sort of “feels” some readers seem to crave, with florid
prose like “the black manacle of grief closing around her shattered heart and locking into place with a horrible sickening thud.” The writing felt so amateurish that it made me question the author’s historical research: her descriptions of people dropping dead in the space of an hour or two from the onset of illness with blood pouring from every orifice sounded more like Ebola than the flu. An irredeemable villainess and a lot of unlikely and contrived plot twists and did not help matters either. Not a fan of this one.
prose like “the black manacle of grief closing around her shattered heart and locking into place with a horrible sickening thud.” The writing felt so amateurish that it made me question the author’s historical research: her descriptions of people dropping dead in the space of an hour or two from the onset of illness with blood pouring from every orifice sounded more like Ebola than the flu. An irredeemable villainess and a lot of unlikely and contrived plot twists and did not help matters either. Not a fan of this one.