4 out of 5 stars

A copy of this was provided free of charge from the publisher in return for an honest review.

It is 1973 and Civil Townsend, who has just qualified from Nursing Scholl wants to make a difference in the world. She joins the Montgomery Family Planning Clinic, where she intends on helping the women of her community make choices for their bodies and lives. But this is not what she finds is happening.

Some of her first patients are two girls aged 11 and 13. They are not sexually active yet and have no interest in boys anyway, but according to the people handling their welfare benefits, they are a priority case for birth control. She is very hesitant about administering a new drug when she hears that it hasn’t been fully tested yet and tries to find another way of helping the girls.

She befriends the family and tries to help them in various ways with housing and other things. One day she arrives at the house to find that they have been collected and taken to hospital. She jumps in her car and heads straight there, only to find out that she is too late and that the thing that she dreaded most happening to them has taken place.

She complains to her boss and is relieved of her duties. The case though is picked up by a young lawyer and then slowly gains nationwide interest even with the politicians in Washington DC. The case consumes all her time and emotional energy and she knows whatever the judgement is will set legal history, but she knows that nothing will ever be the same again for any of them.

Perkins-Valdez has written a really powerful story about another horrific piece of American history. Her fictional characters are inspired by those affected in the real story behind this, but she has fleshed out the narrative and weighted the prose with emotion. Again it is not normally a book that I would pick up normally, but it arrived in a box with some others and I thought that it was worthy of my time. I wasn’t wrong. If there was one flaw, I didn’t like the parallel timeline I the book, I would have preferred the earlier story and then the follow-up story. If you liked The Help then I have a feeling that you’d like this too.

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