Little Souls: A Novel

by Sandra Dallas

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781250277886
Publisher:	St. Martin's Publishing Group
Publication date:	04/26/2022
Pages:	304
Sales rank:	31,972
Product dimensions:	5.70(w) x 8.70(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

Sandra Dallas, dubbed “a quintessential American voice” by Jane Smiley in Vogue, is the author of over a dozen novels, including Prayers for Sale and Tallgrass, many translated into a dozen languages and optioned for films. Six-time winner of the Willa Award and four-time winner of the Spur Award, Dallas was a Business Week reporter for 25 years covering the Rocky Mountain region, and began writing fiction in 1990. She has two daughters and lives with her husband in Denver and Georgetown, Colorado.

Editorial Reviews

"[Dallas is] also a Colorado literary pillar, having appraised nearly every Colorado book worth reading in recent years—and writing more than a few of them herself." —The Denver Post

"This is a tender novel of love, loss, and family support, but it cuts deep with injustices committed against “Little Souls.” —Historical Novel Society

"Exhilarating and hard to resist." —Katherine Powers, The Washington Post on Westering Women

“Putting down a Sandra Dallas novel is nearly impossible.” —Daily Camera (Boulder, Colorado) on Prayers for Sale

“As heartwarming as a homemade quilt.” —USA Today on A Quilt for Christmas

“Both heartwarming and emotional...[reminding us] of the importance of love, family, and the memories that we hold dear as we age.” —Historical Novels Review on The Patchwork Bride

“A born storyteller, Dallas excels not only at plot but also at peopling her novels with memorable individuals.” —Richmond Times Dispatch on True Sisters

From the Publisher

11/01/2021

From Barenbaum, author of Barnes & Noble Discover pick A Bend in the Stars, Atomic Anna features a renowned nuclear scientist who is sleeping as Chernobyl melts down in 1986 and rips through time to meet her estranged daughter Molly in 1992, shot in the chest and begging her to go back and change the past (50,000-copy first printing). In Bird's Last Dance on the Starlight Pier, Evie Grace Devlin tries to leave vaudeville behind to become a nurse in 1930s Galveston, TX, but encounters setbacks and instead gets caught up in the shady world of dance marathons; following the Dublin International Literary Award long-listed Above the East China Sea (75,000-copy first printing). In Spur Award-winning Dallas's 1918 Denver-set Little Souls, sisters Helen and Lutie care for the daughter of a flu victim, and an abusive man's murder is covered up by leaving his body on the streets with all the other corpses to be collected (30,000-copy first printing). PEN/Robert W. Bingham finalist Llanos-Figueroa explores 19th-century Puerto Rican plantation society through Pola, A Woman of Endurance, captured in Africa and brought to Puerto Rico to bear babies subsequently taken from her and enslaved (40,000-copy first printing). First in a tetralogy, Scurati's internationally best-selling, Strega Award-winning M.—short for Mussolini—explores the rise of fascism in Italy (40,000-copy first printing). In The Good Left Undone, the New York Times best-selling Trigiana returns to Italy, where Matelda, the dying matriarch of a Tuscan artisan family, reveals her mother's love of the Scottish sea captain that fathered Matelda during World War II.

Library Journal

2022-02-25
Against the backdrop of the 1918 influenza epidemic, two sisters offer refuge to an abused child.

Dallas’ first-person narrator is 24-year-old Lutie, short for Lucretia, a fashion illustrator for a downtown department store that caters to Denver’s upper class. Lutie lives with her older sister, Helen, who, as a nurse, is dealing firsthand with the misery attending the epidemic. As the novel begins, Lutie, among a small, fearful throng, witnesses the death throes of a soldier on a public street. This is only one instance of Dallas’ graphic depictions of the course of the influenza pandemic in one city, many of which resonate today—although not necessarily the “death wagons” patrolling the streets or the widespread acceptance of public health measures. Lutie arrives home to find Ronald Streeter, the sisters’ downstairs tenant, stabbed to death in the kitchen, Helen standing over him with an ice pick in hand as his 10-year-old daughter, Dorothy, cowers nearby. We soon learn that drunken, depraved Streeter abused his wife, Maud, and had raped Dorothy, also offering her to his crony, Maud’s equally depraved brother. Helen’s fiance, Gil, a medical student also overworked during the pestilence, helps remove the body to a vacant lot, hoping one of the “wagons” will dispose of it along with the anonymous remains of flu victims. As the sisters make a home for the traumatized Dorothy after Maud dies of flu, complications pile up. Long-suppressed secrets emerge as the uncle tries to interfere with the sisters’ adoption case. The parents of Peter, Lutie’s fiance, who is killed in the war, offer staunch help. Dallas makes a worthy effort to use the parlance of the day, erring on the side of formal, somewhat stilted speech on the parts of all but the guttersnipe characters. Aside from these obvious villains, the characters are well intentioned and unfailingly kind, including two hard-boiled detectives. The novel is seeded throughout with tragedy, but the overriding message is hope, and the overarching adversary is not human but a virus.

Vivid scenes from America’s forgotten pandemic.

Kirkus Reviews