In honor of Women’s History Month, consider adding to your reading list these four fascinating new books by — and about — women. Topics include a fresh look at women through history, historical fiction about the immigrant experience, a nonfiction examination of an illegal adoption agency and a memoir about a troubled mother-daughter relationship.
The traditional literary approach to Women’s History Month has been to showcase influential women typically overlooked by the history books, and author Rosalind Miles, founder of the Center for Women’s Studies at Coventry Polytechnic in England, does some of that here. But what really leaps off the page are her re-examinations of women who have been publicly maligned by history. For instance, popular opinion has cast Harriett Beecher Stowe as a racist for her stereotypical portrayals of Blacks in her 1852 bestselling novel “Uncle Tom’s Cabin.” But according to Miles, Stowe was in fact an outspoken abolitionist, and her novel was considered radical at the time for humanizing Black characters and focusing attention on the horrors of slavery. Some attribute her novel to solidifying Northern support prior to the Civil War, including President Abraham Lincoln, who reportedly greeted her by saying, “So this is the little lady who started this great war.” Another example is Mary Mallon, an Irish immigrant living in New York City christened “Typhoid Mary” by the tabloids in 1906 and accused of causing the pandemic. She spent the last 26 years of her life in prison where she died, although in truth, Miles writes, two or three deaths were attributed to her. (William Morrow, $14.99)
There’s a lot of buzz among literary circles for this April 6 debut by Gabriela Garcia. Her multi-generational saga spans three centuries of mothers and daughters, starting with María Isabel, a laborer at a 19-century cigar factory and the sole caretaker for her dying mother in Cuba. On the other end of the timeline is Jeanette, a recovered drug addict in modern-day Miami who impulsively takes in a young girl who is abandoned when her mother, an immigrant from El Salvador, is detained by ICE. Providing counsel to Jeanette is her mother, Carmen, who has her own problems, including a fractured relationship with her mother and unresolved issues surrounding her immigration from Cuba to the United States, about which she is resolutely tight-lipped. Curious about her heritage and fed up with her mother’s reticence, Jeanette goes to Cuba to meet her grandmother, and there she discovers Carmen’s secrets. That’s the intriguing setup for this beautifully crafted novel that explores the many variables and inequalities that make up the immigrant experience and the role that politics, privilege and skin color play in the process. (Flatiron Books, $26.99)
When Lisa Wingate published her wildly successful 2017 novel “Before We Were Yours,” it’s unlikely she could have imagined the impact it would have. A fictionalized story based on real events, the book delved into the activities of Georgia Tann who got rich stealing 5,000 babies from unwed mothers and impoverished parents and then selling them to middle and upper-class families through her Tennessee orphanage and adoption agency between 1924 to 1950. When the book came out, so many readers contacted Wingate to say they were “Tann babies,” that a reunion was organized. Cowritten by Wingate and Judy Christie, “Before and After” is equal parts heartbreaking and inspirational as it tells the story of that reunion and weaves through it the origin stories of many adoptees who went through the Tennessee Children’s Home Society in Memphis. (Ballantine, $17)
‘The Secret Life of Dorothy Soames’
Atlanta-based author Justine Cowan grew up in Los Angeles believing her mother, Eileen, came from a long line of British blue bloods and possibly even royalty. But Eileen’s hypercritical nature, exacting standards and volatile anger drove a wedge between mother and daughter. The two became so estranged that Cowan ignored her mother’s late-in-life attempt to mend their relationship by sending a copy of her memoir and an invitation for the two of them to visit London together to explore Eileen’s roots. It wasn’t until Eileen died and Cowan was overcome with grief that she read her mother’s memoir and began looking into Eileen’s past. What Cowan discovered was the story of an infant reluctantly relinquished by her mother to a stern, austere institution where she was renamed Dorothy Soames and raised until adolescence. Intertwined with the story of Eileen’s dismal childhood is the history of London’s Foundling Hospital, a grim orphanage dating back to the Victorian era where the children of unwed mothers were warehoused. The memoir is a kind of double tragedy. In addition to the tragedy of Eileen’s childhood, there is the tragedy of the author waiting too long to resolve her relationship with her mother. (HarperCollins, $27.99)
Suzanne Van Atten is a book critic and contributing editor to The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. svanatten@ajc.com.
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