- Home
-
Hard Hat Tours
-
Events
-
About
-
Shop
-
Donate
FREE
| /
Virtual Event - FREE
Virtual Event and Autographed Book - $16.99
Once you register a zoom link will be sent by email on the day of the event.
In the fall of 1918, thirteen-year-old German immigrant Pia Lange longs to be far from Philadelphia’s overcrowded slums and the anti-immigrant sentiment that compelled her father to enlist in the U.S. Army. But as her city celebrates the end of war, an even more urgent threat arrives: the Spanish flu. Funeral crepe and quarantine signs appear on doors as victims drop dead in the streets and desperate survivors wear white masks to ward off illness. When food runs out in the cramped tenement she calls home, Pia must venture alone into the quarantined city in search of supplies, leaving her baby brothers behind.
Bernice Groves has become lost in grief and bitterness since her baby died from the Spanish flu. Watching Pia leave her brothers alone, Bernice makes a shocking, life-altering decision. It becomes her sinister mission to tear families apart when they’re at their most vulnerable, planning to transform the city’s orphans and immigrant children into what she feels are “true Americans.”
Waking in a makeshift hospital days after collapsing in the street, Pia is frantic to return home. Instead, she is taken to St. Vincent’s Orphan Asylum – the first step in a long and arduous journey. As Bernice plots to keep the truth hidden at any cost in the months and years that follow, Pia must confront her own shame and fear, risking everything to see justice – and love – triumph at last. Powerful, harrowing, and ultimately exultant, The Orphan Collector is a story of love, resilience, and the lengths we will go to protect those who need us most.
Ellen Marie Wiseman is the New York Times bestselling author of the highly acclaimed historical fiction novels The Orphan Collector, What She Left Behind, The Plum Tree,Coal River, The Life She Was Given, and The Lost Girls of Willowbrook. Born and raised in Three Mile Bay, a tiny hamlet in Northern New York, she’s a first-generation German American who discovered her love of reading and writing while attending first grade in one of the last one-room schoolhouses in New York State. Since then, her novels have been published worldwide, translated into twenty-two languages, and named to “Best Of” lists by Reading Group Choices, Good Housekeeping, Goodreads, The Historical Novel Society, Great Group Reads, and more. A mother of two, Ellen lives on the shores of Lake Ontario with her husband and dogs. Visit her online at EllenMarieWiseman.com.
Maria Smilios has a Master of Arts in religion and literature from Boston University, where she was a Luce Scholar and a Presidential Scholar. Ms. Smilios spent five years at Springer Science & Business Media as development editor in the biomedical sciences and has written for The Guardian, American Nurse, The Forward, Narratively, The Rumpus, and DAME Magazine.
All proceeds from the event go directly to supporting Save Ellis Island's mission to restore the 29 buildings in the Historic Hospital Complex.
Once you register a zoom link will be sent by email on the day of the event.
