Historical Fiction

Meet Hannah Holden, age 12 in 1918. Her story is set in the "home front" of England, where she, her two sisters ages 8 and 15, her brother, age 14, and her mother struggle to make it through the outbreak of the "Spanish influenza." Her father is fighting in the trenches in France, where the pandemic is also taking countless lives. Hannah's story is told through a compilation of her own diary entries and her father's letters home.
Hannah's father, Jonathon, leaves his family to fight in late spring 1819, just after the spread of the three-day fever, a version of what was later called Spanish influenza that was only slightly less benign as a bad cold. Jonathon , along with several of Hannah's other family members, had caught the three-day fever and recovered. However, not long after Jonathon goes to war, the strain of flu mutates into a far more dangerous form that ends up infecting 1/5 of the world and killing more than world war one itself.
Jonathon blames the war and all countries involved, England included, for the wide-spread devastation of the influenza. Meanwhile, back home, Hannah tries to push past the struggles within and outside the family created by the flu, in order to aid her country on the "home front."

I will most likely have to scale this back some.

Sources I have used so far: (for general research)

http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/health-and-families/health-news/flu-how-britain-coped-in-the-1918-epidemic-511987.html

http://www.vlib.us/medical/parsons.htm

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/influenza/introduction

http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/FWWinfluenzia.htm