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I’m emotionally torn with this story:

Young love between Gabriel and Maggie with the harsh disapproval by Maggie’s father of Gabriel. Maggie and her father have a very special family bond, which will soon be horribly broken.

There is an underlying current of dissension between the English and the French Canadians (Quebec, Canada) and that those two tolerate each other but should not mingle. Ironically, Maggie’s English father married her French mother and it is, what we find out later, a marriage of lust, not of love and they both are bitter hearted.

Gabriel (French) and Maggie’s (French/English) relationship intensifies, much to her parents dismay and she is sent off to live with her uncle and aunt, who have their own set of problems and create more for Maggie.

Maggie becomes pregnant at the age of 15 with Gabriel’s child, and her parents, to save face for her future and their own reputation, force her to give up the child and not see him again.

The emotion level from here on gets kicked up a notch through all the next chapters. The baby is named Elodie and the sadness and betrayals and secrets are so painful - there are so many, and not just by one person.

I will not divulge any more of the story other than this: what Elodie goes through is horrendous. She is not adopted as a baby, but instead raised by nuns at an orphanage. She was getting an education and good self care. However, Due to a law granting more funding to psychiatric hospitals than the impoverished orphanages, the orphans were falsely deemed mentally ill and were transferred over and mixed in with the mentally retarded and mentally ill in a highly secure facility with psychotic drugging, punishment, strait-jacket torture, beatings, suspicious deaths,
Physical and mental abuse and more. Elodie no longer was being educated and had no idea of what goes on in the outside world. She was merely existing and trying to survive; keeping her mouth shut and following the restrictive rules, trusting no one. It was so absolutely very sad what she had to endure for 17 years of her life. She has physical and mental scars from this. When she finally achieved her freedom, she was not prepared to cope with the world outside the facility walls and its stimulation but with the help of a kind nun and a friend/roommate, she starts making up for lost time, getting a job, learning about everything that was stifled in the facility. She also has a sexual encounter of which she is totally innocent and naive about which adds another element to the story.

In the meantime, Maggie begins a search for Elodie. More secrets, lies, betrayals, falsifying information, hiding information. Her father was behind a lot of this which he tells her was done for her own good. In her heart of hearts, she would often think of the child she signed away with the hope of one day finding her.

At the end, all the pieces and people connect. I think maybe the pieces fell into place a little too neatly/tidily or perhaps I was emotionally corrupted reading about the very wrong behaviors for 17 years in the mental facility that made it difficult for me to accept the positive ending. Because even now as I write this, Elodie’s personal story and the quest by Maggie to find her daughter, so many years later, are still stuck deep in my head. Elodie is messed up; will she be “normal� after what she’s gone though? She’s missed social and physical interactions with people. Can she forgive her mother, her father, her grandparents, the horrible nuns, nurses and doctors who were of no help to her and instead of listening to her, punished and drugged her to shut her up and make her complacent?

This is a very hard and emotional story and I am having a really difficult time with the acceptance and forgiveness parts. If it comes, it certainly is not going to happen overnight and the bad stuff just does not disappear and everyone lives happily ever after.