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Trends... I don’t know if it is me, but I’m feeling as though publishers are offering a lot of COMPELLING, HIDDEN IN THE PAST, SHOCKING, TRUE STORY of.... these days...

Are we so hooked on reality TV or the old Apprentice host that we need all of those headlines?

Or are these kinds of stories grabbing publishers� attentions simply because they know we will be shocked to know how power has been so meanly abused barely a century ago, almost where we could be living ourselves - over us, a friend or a neighbour? Not at some border.... No. But in the course of trying to get through a hard stage of life.

BEFORE WE WERE YOURS by Lisa Wingate is the most recognizable of these kinds of novels. It takes place in Mississippi in the 1930s, when an unwed mothers State Home operator and her cohort, the Adoption Agency, set up shop looking for as many pretty blonde blue eyed babies they could find in addition to the ones actually arriving in need of Home services. (I reviewed it on my page).

I admit to being more greatly captivated by THE HOME FOR UNWANTED GIRLS, by Joanna Goodman.

The authors’s writing styles are actually quite similar, each developing character thoroughly as possible in what would have been their real life situations and carefully threading history into the personal story which is the essential fabric of the life of the story.

Still, I found the Quebec, Canada circumstances especially fascinating. As I followed the plight of the families, I was equally enthralled in Goodman’s very thorough treatment of the pertinent history.

From the stories of Maggie, the young mom who lost her babe Elodie,moving on to the diabolical mess of the Quebec orphanage system, to Gabriel the young father and the intervening years when Elodie’s story takes precedence, the novel begins to tragically meld and then a builds to a frantic urgency. I wondered when, if, how, this will end...

A great tale, very well supported by the facts - and well written enough to inspire further research.

The facts led me to further dig into the history of what are known as the “Duplessis Orphans�. Further background leads belief that some very powerful psychiatric drugs, only in their testing stages, were used on those children as well. This jibes with the author’s narratives.

Goodman, I think, has done a good job on opening the door on a really horrific period I knew nothing about.

I was a wee child in Quebec, Canada with my family, part of which would have been during Duplessis� terms as provincial leader. I recall how the Catholic Church and Duplessis were always spoken of with a kind of a sneer - I was only very little!

What came to pass in Quebec did and could, because Duplessis exerted a totally different sort of power in government than in the rest of Canada. He had pulled power from the Catholic Church which had held sway since the 1600s, put them to work in the social services areas of health and education at low wages, and then saved his government massive expenditures.
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“A modernizer except in political methodology, Duplessis perfected the techniques of the past in exalting the Québec state to an unprecedented position of strength in relation to the church, the federal government and the Anglo-Saxon Montréal business establishment. His system depended upon employing the clergy at bargain wages to do what was really secular work in schools and hospitals, while reducing the episcopate to financial dependence; reducing taxes, balancing budgets and persuading the conservatives and nationalists to vote together (for "autonomy" as he called it).

(Source : The Canadian Encyclopaedia
)�

I like historical fiction well treated by its factual structure, especially when its significant theme is central. Joanna Goodman has done a standout job out here.

Goodman is masterful at characterisation as well. Each individual is sketched in powerful contrast to the other, and the force of their personalities surprisingly moved years in handfuls of pages, as I eagerly read on. Suddenly, Élodie was praying to be let out after Duplessis’s death while a smirking nun is lying about her dead mother; nearby, her mother Maggie finds evidence in her dead dad’s store of the adoption and a place to start to look...

*
Numbers vary but it is around 20,000 children who were essentially incarcerated. The government admitted that a third didn’t need to be there, and gave them a very small settlement.
**
Duplessis died in 1959. A Quiet Revolution occurred in the 1960s which completely secularised government.
****
Writing 4 strong stars
Unique 5 strong stars
Research, background
5 strong stars
So... 4.9