Book Review: The Home For Unwanted Girls

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 This is my book review for The Home For Unwanted Girls by Joanna Goodman.

Book Summary:

Fifteen-year-old Maggie lives in 1950s Quebec. When her parents find out she’s pregnant, they force her to go live with her aunt and uncle until the baby is born. Even though she doesn’t get to keep her child, she names her Elodie. It is the name of a lily, a flower she’s always loved.

The one thing Maggie has always known is that when she grows up, she wants to take over her father’s seed company. She loves everything about gardening and seeds. Her father is known as “the seed man.”

Elodie was raised in an impoverished orphanage system that was abruptly switched to a mental institution. All the orphans are declared mentally ill. This is because the government pays the orphanage more money to care for the mentally ill children.

Elodie suffers at the hands of the nuns and lives an abysmal existence. Finally, she ages out of the system into a world she knows nothing about and is ill-equipped to live in. In a few years, she will have a daughter of her own. Then she will understand that it isn’t easy to be a single mother.

Maggie married a man her father approved of. But she never really loved him as much as she loved Elodie’s father. Her father never approved of Gabriel because he was French and poor.

A Decade Later:

A decade later, Maggie runs into Gabriel. Maggie and Gabriel end up getting back together. They try to find Elodie, but the nuns lie to them and say that Elodie died shortly after birth. They tell Elodie that her mother died as well.

This is a terrific book, and I read it in two nights and did not want the story to end. I was so intrigued by the characters and the fact that this heartbreaking novel is based on a true story.

I wish there were a sequel because I’d be first in line to read it.

About the Author:

JOANNA GOODMAN is the author of four previous novels, including the Canadian bestseller, The Finishing School. Her stories have appeared in The Fiddlehead, The Ottawa Citizen, B & A Fiction, Event, The New Quarterly, and White Wall Review. They’ve been excerpted in Elisabeth Harvor’s fiction anthology A Room at the Heart of Things.

The Home for Unwanted Girls is inspired by the story of Joanna’s mother. She was the daughter of an Anglo “Seed Man” and a French-Canadian mother.

Originally from Montreal, Joanna now lives in Toronto with her husband and two kids. She is the owner of the Canadian linen company Au Lit Fine Linens.