Overall Take:
Such a moving story about an underrepresented part of history, buy a copy today!
Star Rating:
5 stars
Genre:
Women’s Fiction (Bookclub fiction), Historical Fiction
Synopsis:
It’s the 1960’s. Lorraine is a senior in high school, and she has it all, an upstanding family, the perfect boyfriend, and she’s on track to be valedictorian. However, right before her boyfriend leaves for college, she and her boyfriend become physical, and Lorraine gets pregnant.
To hide their daughter’s shame, Lorraine’s parents send her to a maternity home for wayward girls. Things aren’t exactly as great as they seem, and the house is full of dark secrets and suffocating rules. As Lorraine works to piece together a new vision for her life, she must decide if she can fight against the powers that aim to take her child or submit to the rules of society.
Thoughts:
This book was so good. It hit a little close to home for me because my mom was born in 1965 and my grandma was unwed. Thankfully, she was older and not a teenager, or I might have ended up on an entirely different path, very similar to that portrayed in this story. I just can’t believe that we treated young women this way, well I can but I don’t want to, it’s just hard to fathom. It also doesn’t feel like 1965 was almost 60 years ago, to think that things like this were still happening then is so sad.
This book was so wonderfully written, and it just blew me away. The writing was so captivating and held my interest from start to finish, I needed to know what was going to happen and my heart just broke for Lorraine. She was such a great character, and she was so relatable to me. She was so smart, and worked so hard, and then one moment of pressure her world was turned upside down and her life was forced on an entirely different trajectory than she had imagined. This story just hammers in that some decisions we make in life can have lifelong consequences, and ones we never even thought imaginable.
This book is very gut wrenching and emotional, but it is an important and worthwhile read. It will open your eyes to a part of history that is often overlooked but was very real. The ending on this one was what I saw coming, but it was also bittersweet. I do wish that we had gotten a little more in the end from how Lorraine was doing, but I do understand leaving some things for the reader to imagine.
Lorraine’s character will stick with me a long time and I’ll be thinking of all the countless times versions of her story played out over history.
This was my first book by this author, but I will be going back and reading her debut novel.
Thanks for my copy to:
Thank you so much to the publisher Sourcebooks Landmark @bookmarked and Netgalley @netgalley for this wonderful and moving e-arc in exchange for an honest review.
Publication Date:
March 5, 2024
Author:
Meagan Church
Page Length:
352 pages
Publisher:
Sourcebooks Landmark
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