The Hidden Life of Cecily Larson
On a cold day in November 1924, four-year-old Cecily Larson’s single mother places Cecily in a Chicago orphanage. Mother promises to return and take her back but never does. Three years later, the orphanage sells Cecily to a traveling circus. She becomes part of a bareback riding team, falls in love with a roustabout, injures her knee and wrist, and is kicked out of the circus. Eighty years later, Cecily, now a 94-year-old widow, lives alone in a Minnesota small town. A hard fall in her too-big house lands her in the local hospital. Her daughter, Liz, helps her recover, as do granddaughter Molly, fourteen-year-old great-grandson Caden, and even Caden’s divorced father. This makes the perfect setting for Caden’s honors bio project—collecting DNA samples from four generations and checking everyone’s background.
The timelines of Cecily’s early life and that of her family in 2015 unfold side-by-side. Bit by bit, readers and Cecily’s modern-day family learn of Cecily’s hidden past, long-buried heartaches and survival. Author Baker adds subplots of other health scares, sexual abuse, alcoholism, more orphans with other adoptions, and faraway strangers sending in for their own DNA searches.
This novel delves deeply into human cruelty and kindness, evolving racism, the Depression’s crushing impact on common people, and relationships based on love or arranged to satisfy social expectations. Through it all, the main and secondary characters ring true and are easy to abhor or admire. The detailed settings fit the time and place. Several plot twists require readers to suspend belief, and some dialogue passages are too long and too perfect. But overall, this is an intense true-to-life literary family saga spanning ninety years. Recommended.
