num_pages: 310
description: August 1918 Everybody likes twelve-year-old Josie Winslow. While she helps in the family drug store and plans for the first day of school, her pharmacist father is puzzled by newspaper articles about influenza arriving in New York on ships from Europe. It is still summer. Flu is a winter disease. He wonders if it is too early to order extra cough and cold medicine.Billy Detwiler has been kicked out of prep school. No one, not even Billy, is happy he will be in Josie’s school let alone her eighth-grade class. He is a bully of the first order and is looking for his next victim. He calls Josie “Pharmacy Girl,” but it is no compliment.By mid-October, what was once “just the flu” is now an epidemic. Doctors are baffled. Josie’s father has never seen anything like it. Flu is usually only a problem for the very old or the very young. But Spanish influenza is it is killing young and healthy adults—like Josie’s parents.First, Josie’s mother catches the deadly disease. Next, Josie’s best friend is down with it too. Then Josie’s little sister gets sick. But there are no effective vaccines, no ventilators, and no anti-virals to stop a pandemic.Can Josie help the people she loves, and the bully she hates, survive?Published before COVID and inspired by stories of the author’s pharmacist grandfather, Pharmacy Girl is Kate Szegda’s award-winning debut novel for middle-grade readers and people who love history.If you like historically rich page turners and encouraging stories of hope and resilience, you will love Pharmacy Girl.Awards
language: English
title: Pharmacy Girl: The Great War, Spanish Influenza, and the Truth about Billy Detwiler
publisher: Independently published