My thoughts
This is now my favorite book by this author. Her book, The Orphan Collector, was and it is a great book also.
This book is very emotional. Even when things are good. When things go as you want them too, it's emotional. I laughed in a few places at the things children said. Overall though I cried many tears for the characters in this novel. The things I read about really happened. It was awful and to know that it happened right here in the USA makes it even more upsetting to me. How could this country be the very one that started such horrid things. The very one who taught other countries how to find and stop people who they deem unworthy to be either killed or sterilized. How dare they. Let us hope it never happens again. Oh how I hope it's not happening now.
This is a story about a young woman and her family who entered the USA via Ellis Island. Who saved everything they had to come to this country to find a better life. Who had nothing back home or here but were willing to work hard. But who were deemed unacceptable. Or at least the young boy and his mother were unaccepted. This young woman was allowed to enter the country. But only after she went through a vigorous inspection and sprayed with chemicals and humiliated by the people who were suppose to help her. Her and her little girl. Her brother and mother were deemed unfit. Her brother they said was feeble minded and her mother to sickly. Sickly after just departing a ship. After being so seasick. Feeble minded because he refused to answer some questions and could barely speak English. He was learning. He was a hard worker and he was young. Only fifteen.
The story starts at Ellis Island. May 31, 1928. Magdalena Conti and her family, her mother, brother, and child, landed on Ellis Island and had such dreams of a better life. In Germany they had gone through many horrors after the war. They saw things that no one should ever have to see. Families killed. Bombings. Starvation. They thought coming to America would be so much better.
What Lena goes through is so sad. She is alone with just her daughter after her mom and brother are sent back to Germany. A distant cousin, Silas Wolfe, had paid for Enzo and Mutti's passage. They would work for him. But since they were sent back it was Lena whom he got. She was to take care of the house and his two children. Their mother had died in childbirth. He needed the help. It was hard work but Lena was willing to work to ensure her daughter Ella had food to eat. And boy did they have food. More food than Lena had thought possible for a single family.
Lena goes through so much though. It was not a matter of just getting here and working for a person and living happily ever after. Silas's children and Lena's child were taken from them by people who wanted the mountain land. They were taken away and no one knew where or how to find them. Lena was put in an institution and sterilized. Told that the sterilization was the only way she would ever get out. She was deemed dimwitted because she had a child out of wedlock.
What happened in this book gave me pause. Made me think about this country in a whole new light. How dare they. Who did these people think they were. How can anyone think it's ok to take away a person's ability to have children just because they look different or because you want their land. Yes they took the children from Silas because they wanted his farm. His land. The things he worked hard for. Him and many other mountain people.
This book is so well researched and written that you will learn what exactly happened back then in Virginia. How the land was stolen from hard working people. People who were citizens of this country. Who had lived here many generations. And how immigrants were truly treated when entering this country. Most likely still are treated this way. The research shows how the USA set up places to euthanize human beings. It's in the Author's note. Please read that part. It has so much info that you should know. Things I didn't know about.
Thank you #KensingtonPublishing, #RBmedia, for this arc.
About
In rural 1930s Virginia, a young immigrant mother fights for her dignity and those she loves against America’s rising eugenics movement – when widespread support for policies of prejudice drove imprisonment and forced sterilizations based on class, race, disability, education, and country of origin – in this tragic and uplifting novel of social injustice, survival, and hope for readers of Susan Meissner, Kristin Hannah, and Christina Baker Kline.
When Lena Conti—a young, unwed mother—sees immigrant families being forcibly separated on Ellis Island, she vows not to let the officers take her two-year old daughter. But the inspection process is more rigorous than she imagined, and she is separated from her mother and teenage brother, who are labeled burdens to society, denied entry, and deported back to Germany. Now, alone but determined to give her daughter a better life after years of living in poverty and near starvation, she finds herself facing a future unlike anything she had envisioned.
Silas Wolfe, a widowed family relative, reluctantly brings Lena and her daughter to his weathered cabin in Virginia’s Blue Ridge Mountains to care for his home and children. Though the hills around Wolfe Hollow remind Lena of her homeland, she struggles to adjust. Worse, she is stunned to learn the children in her care have been taught to hide when the sheriff comes around. As Lena meets their neighbors, she realizes the community is vibrant and tight knit, but also senses growing unease. The State of Virginia is scheming to paint them as ignorant, immoral, and backwards so they can evict them from their land, seize children from parents, and deal with those possessing “inferior genes.”
After a social worker from the Eugenics Office accuses Lena of promiscuity and feeblemindedness, her own worst fears come true. Sent to the Virginia State Colony for the Feebleminded and Epileptics, Lena face impossible choices in hopes of reuniting with her daughter—and protecting the people, and the land, she has grown to love.
When Lena Conti—a young, unwed mother—sees immigrant families being forcibly separated on Ellis Island, she vows not to let the officers take her two-year old daughter. But the inspection process is more rigorous than she imagined, and she is separated from her mother and teenage brother, who are labeled burdens to society, denied entry, and deported back to Germany. Now, alone but determined to give her daughter a better life after years of living in poverty and near starvation, she finds herself facing a future unlike anything she had envisioned.
Silas Wolfe, a widowed family relative, reluctantly brings Lena and her daughter to his weathered cabin in Virginia’s Blue Ridge Mountains to care for his home and children. Though the hills around Wolfe Hollow remind Lena of her homeland, she struggles to adjust. Worse, she is stunned to learn the children in her care have been taught to hide when the sheriff comes around. As Lena meets their neighbors, she realizes the community is vibrant and tight knit, but also senses growing unease. The State of Virginia is scheming to paint them as ignorant, immoral, and backwards so they can evict them from their land, seize children from parents, and deal with those possessing “inferior genes.”
After a social worker from the Eugenics Office accuses Lena of promiscuity and feeblemindedness, her own worst fears come true. Sent to the Virginia State Colony for the Feebleminded and Epileptics, Lena face impossible choices in hopes of reuniting with her daughter—and protecting the people, and the land, she has grown to love.
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