They Came Like Swallows

This book is on most serious writers’ shelves. It’s gorgeous. I loved being in the mind of a child over a century ago, dealing with the Spanish Flu (never believing we would face something as bad as Covid). Here was a lovely mother, all one could wish a mother to be and a child so in love with her that he can hardly comprehend her vulnerability. 

Love and loss are beautifully rendered. Yes, it’s sad, but I was so involved that I pulled for the father to heal from his grief and make way for his son to heal as… show more.

This book is an old favorite of mine, and I picked up again after decades of not having read it because it deals with a child’s experience of his mother’s death during the 1918 influenza pandemic.

As a historian of childhood, I was thinking about the experiences of children during the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic and of this past one. I recalled that this was the best book I had read that captured the feeling of losing a mother and the family transformation that followed.

It is a beautifully written, melancholy book. So much is left unsaid by the… show more.