I finished this book a few days ago, but have been meaning to read it for quite some time now. A patron recommended it to me at work. I had kind of put off reading it because, often times, books on topics such as adoption tend to be a bit dry. However, once I picked it up I was completely enthralled. It was very well written and grabbed me right away. It tellsthe story of adoption from WWII to 1973 when Roe vs Wade occurred through the eyes of the women, then young girls, who gave up their children. Now I don’t really know much about adoption, and have never really though much about it, but that sure changed after I finished this. The stories the women in the book told are absolutely heartbreaking. How they were sent away, told they didn’t deserve their baby, and basically given no choice in keeping their child. These women were from all walks of life and each had lost a child (some more than one). The tragedy lay not only in the fact that they gave their children up, but also in the complete lack of education they received about sex, birth, and what would happen afterwards. Many of the girls did not even know how birth happened until after they delivered their baby. The stories of the places these girls went reminded me of the Japanese internment camps we had here during WWII. This book weaves a wonderful, but heartbreaking, story that will make you really realize what this time must have been like for these girls.
