The Girls We Sent Away
The Girls We Sent Away is set during the Baby Scoop era in the 1960s, when thousands of babies were relinquished to the authorities for adoption, willingly and unwillingly. Lorraine Delford is in her last year of high school, an avid scholar and promising valedictorian, dreaming of a career in the space industry. When she realises she is pregnant, after one date which unexpectedly turned intimate, she can’t really process what’s happening. Forced to tell her parents, they give her no choice but to leave school and hide at home, while her mother invents a story for friends and relatives that Lorraine has gone to help an ailing aunt. Her father drives her to a home for unwed mothers when she is six months pregnant, and both mother and father wash their hands of her, neither visiting, nor writing, nor offering any kind of advice. At seventeen Lorraine is entirely on her own.
Church’s story gets deep inside Lorraine’s head with tenderness and compassion, so much so that the first half of the novel might be aimed at the young adult market. Four themes make a deep impact: the complete lack of ownership by the men involved, the complete lack of autonomy over their own lives for the girls, the astounding ignorance in which girls like Lorraine were raised, and the preposterous idea that after the rollercoaster ride of a pregnancy and birth, the girls should return to their lives and pretend nothing happened! This is a heartbreaking tale of prejudice, shame and secret-keeping within families, and a sincere and moving account of one teenager’s personal grief and inner strength, which I think will appeal strongly to readers aged 14+.
