Review - As Bright as Heaven by Susan Meissner

5 ✩✩✩✩✩

"The most powerful weapon on earth is the human soul on fire." -Ferdinand Foch

My love for historical fiction continues to grow and As Bright ad Heaven has nurtured my soul! What an amazing story! This is a story about love and family. About choices, consequences and the amazing resilience of the human spirit. 

Set in 1918 Philadelphia during the Great War and The Spanish Flu pandemic which is believed to have claimed the lives of about 50 million people, worldwide.

After the death of her infant son, Henry, who was born with a heart defect, Pauline and Thomas Bright make a decision to move from the small town of Quakertown Pennsylvania to Philadelphia in hopes of giving their three daughters a better life. 

They arrive in Philadelphia with their daughters; Evelyn, Maggie, and Willa. The family moves into Thomas’ Uncle Fred’s home and begin anew. Soon they are faced with challenges that are greater than anyone ever imagined. Lives are changed in the chaos that was The Great War and the Flu pandemic. Choices will be made with great, life changing consequences. 

One of my favorite things in a book is to read the story though the eyes of each of the characters. The story is told in four different points of view which makes it that much easier to fall in love with each one of them. It contains a set of unforgettable characters with lives that change as the story progresses. They each grow, or are forced to grow in a world where hope seems to have been lost and replaced by despair and anguish. 

Life is made up of choices and each choice we make comes with a consequence, a cause and effect, if you will. Sometimes the consequences are revealed to us right away, while others might take longer, much longer to appear. Sometimes an entire lifetime. Some choices are small, like weather to have tea instead of coffee, buy a red car instead of the white. Some are life changing and this story is the perfect example of how life works in mysterious ways. 

If you enjoy historical fiction as much as I do, you will most definitely enjoy this one. It will have you in tears from start to finish and leave you with a wonderful and warm feeling in your heart.