Review: As Bright as Heaven

As Bright as Heaven by Susan Meissner
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Set exactly a hundred years ago, As Bright as Heaven begins during times of great turmoil- in the last year of the Great World War (WWI) when the pandemic influenza outbreak (the Spanish Flu) that killed as much as five percent of the world's population swept the globe. Told in alternating female voices, we share the thoughts and lives of Pauline Bright, and her three daughters, Evelyn, Maggie, and Willa. The story opens with the Bright family suffering the terrible loss of their infant son, Henry, from heart disease. The loss jolts their life on a tobacco farm in quiet Quakertown, and they decide to make a fresh start by taking Thomas's aging uncle Fred up on an offer to move to Philadelphia and learn to take over Fred's mortuary business. Philadelphia offers big libraries, better schools and a better way of life for the three Bright daughters and Thomas Bright is glad for the opportunity. (Sadly, the denser population also means that Philadelphia was hard hit by the influenza pandemic of 1918, which claimed a staggering estimated fifty million lives worldwide.)

Pauline is a loving mother who is haunted by the loss of her son, who feels the presence of death around her, and not just because her husband is learning to be an undertaker. Each of the three Bright daughters has a unique story to tell. Evie, the oldest, is the bookworm, a smart, sensitive and reliable girl of fifteen. Maggie, a brave, curious, and kind thirteen-year-old, is the middle child who clings to her mother following the loss of her beloved baby brother, Henry. Willa is an irrepressible child of seven at the start of the story.

The heart of this story begins after less than a year of the family living in Philadelphia. Thomas and a neighbor's young adult son, Jamie, are called to military service, and not long thereafter a terrible strain of influenza virus enters Philadelphia, a large port city with a naval shipyard, and begins to spread like wildfire following a patriotic parade. Without Thomas on hand, Fred struggles to keep up with the number of dead coming into the funeral home. He wants Pauline and the girls to return to small Quakertown to wait out the epidemic, but shockingly, her family refuses to let them return home, due to fears of influenza coming with them. So the Brights shelter in place in a city that gradually becomes like a ghost town, with empty streets, closed public venues, and most people afraid to go out because of the risk of exposure to the illness. With hospitals unable to accept more patients, many people remained stuck in their homes with little or no assistance upon falling sick. As part of a church aid service, Pauline goes out to assist the ill one day, taking Maggie with her. While on this goodwill mission, Maggie rescues a baby from a home in which the mother has died from influenza. She briefly interacts with the baby's sister, who seems to be dying. Pauline is alarmed that Maggie has found a baby and in an all-too-human moment of poor judgment, Maggie fails to disclose that the sister was still alive when she found the baby. This decision will come back to haunt the later portion of the Bright family's story. In the short term, however, the Bright family is forced to struggle with their own terrible losses while caring for the baby, who Willa dubs Alex. As influenza slowly burns itself out in Philadelphia, the girls return to school and are further shellshocked to find many friends and teachers have died. Part Two, which begins seven years later, in 1925, finds the Bright family moving forward with life and work, raising their beloved Alex as their own.

Mixing the sweetness of the coming of age stories of the Bright daughters reminiscent of A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, with the bitterness of loss, Meissner has created an emotionally engaging piece of historical fiction. As Bright as Heaven offers an interesting perspective on the influenza pandemic, speaking to the commonality of loss experienced through war and illness in 1918, a year in which almost everyone lost someone. It also gives us a fascinating look at mortuary work, in general, but especially during ghastly times such as those in a pandemic. The brutal randomness of influenza taking so much from so many is captured here. Yet this is still an inspiring story about life, family, and love. The Bright family manages, as Willa says, to sift through the great pile of ashes and still find things the fire didn't take.

A lovely book.

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