Light and Air

Mindy Nichols Wendell

eBook - 2024

It's 1935, and tuberculosis is ravaging the nation. Everyone is afraid of this deadly respiratory illness. But what happens when you actually have it?When Halle and her mother both come down with TB, they are shunned—and then they are sent to the J.N. Adam Tuberculosis Hospital: far from home, far from family, far from the world.Tucked away in the woods of upstate New York, the hospital is a closed and quiet place. But it is not, Halle learns, a prison. Free of her worried and difficult father for the first time in her life, she slowly discovers joy, family, and the healing power of honey on the children's ward, where the girls on the floor become her confidantes and sisters. But when Mama suffers a lung hemorrhage, their entire... future—and recovery—is thrown into question....Light and Air deals tenderly and insightfully with isolation, quarantine, found family, and illness. Set in the fully realized world of a... more