I Couldn't Do It

The Orphan Collector

by Ellen Marie Wiseman

Rating: Did Not Finish

I finished two chapters of this book and stopped. Maybe it's because the last book I read was so brutal (See my review of Tender Is The Flesh), I could not stand to read the horrible things in this book. 

The Orphan Collector takes place in 1918 at the start of the Spanish Flu pandemic. The descriptions of illness and death were bad enough. What got to me was the character of Bernice, who despises immigrants and thinks they are the cause of the flu and her personal economic woes.

Now the entire city was teeming with large ghettos housing every type of foreigner she could think of, and they were stealing jobs from real Americans

I heard enough of that kind of racist thinking during the previous presidential administration, thank you very much. I don't need to spend my free time reading a book with the main character with those beliefs.