No Names to Be Given

One is raped by a man her parents are sure they can trust. One has a casual fling. One is at college and finds herself in love for the first time with a man her parents would never approve of.

In the mid-1960s, three women find themselves at the Magnolia Home in New Orleans, all pregnant, all needing some way out of their predicament. By a wild coincidence, their babies are born on the same day, leaving the three of them connected in a way few women ever are.

My mother was adopted as an infant in the mid-1960s, which has left me with a deep fascination with this time period and the plight of young, single, pregnant women. The stories of Faith, Sandy, and Beth all drew me in and made me feel for each of them, but at times as I read, I felt their stories felt more like interconnected summaries than a true novel. I would have loved to see more depth and less skipping about in time from one year to the next. Maybe then I would have felt as though I truly knew and understood the women rather than just feeling as though they were figures on a page.