Review: Little Souls

Little Souls by Sandra Dallas
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

It is not often that you will see me handing out 5-star reviews or recommending books. Well, this is one book that I must do both for.

This is an amazing book, but you must be prepared for it delves into many issues we are dealing with today, and they are not pretty.

Trigger Warnings include but are not limited to-Covid/Spanish flu, incest, rape, murder, war, sexism, and so much heartache that I don't know how I stood it. But I did because this book just had to have had a happy ending. It just ha to-and it did.

You do need to do a little suspension of disbelief with Little Souls because it was difficult for me to grasp how much could go wrong and did. How many lives were lost. It just boggled my mind. However, the author handles this all with aplomb and has you believing every word and action the characters make/take.

This book reminds me of another author who tackled a similar look at what was happening in America during this same period and pandemic. If you have Kindle Unlimited, you are in luck if you choose to read another book similar to this one. The Orphan Collector

This book, Little Souls, is superior, though.

This was a fantastic historical fiction novel, and I will surely be visiting my library to read more written by Sandra Dallas.

*ARC supplied by the publisher St. Martin's Press, the author Sandra Dallas, and NetGalley. Many thanks.

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SYNOPSIS: "Sandra Dallas's Little Souls is a gripping tale of sisterhood, loyalty, and secrets set in Denver amid America’s last deadly flu pandemic.

Colorado, 1918. World War I is raging overseas, but it’s the home front battling for survival. With the Spanish Flu rampant, Denver’s schools are converted into hospitals, churches and funeral homes are closed, and horse-drawn wagons collect corpses left in the street. Sisters Helen and Lutie have moved to Denver from Iowa after their parents’ deaths. Helen, a nurse, and Lutie, a carefree advertising designer at a fashionable women’s store share a small, neat house, and each finds a local beau—for Helen a doctor, for Lutie a young student who soon enlists. They make a modest income from a rental apartment in the basement. When their tenant dies from the flu, the sisters are thrust into caring for the woman’s small daughter, Dorothy. Soon after, Lutie comes home from work and discovers a dead man on their kitchen floor and Helen standing above the body, an icepick in hand. She has no doubt Helen killed the man—Dorothy’s father—in self-defense, but she knows that will be hard to prove. They decide to leave the body in the street, hoping to disguise it as a flu victim.

Meanwhile Lutie also worries about her fiancé “over there.” As it happens, his wealthy mother harbors a secret of her own and helps the sisters as the danger deepens, from both the murder investigation and the outbreak.

Set against the backdrop of an epidemic that feels all too familiar, Little Souls is a compelling tale of sisterhood and of the sacrifices people make to protect those they love most"