How Foster Care Failed Three Girls
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The American Booksellers Association puts out a monthly listing of books that are recommended by independent booksellers. Calling it the “Indie Next List,” each list contains 25 titles. For each chosen book, we learn what person – at what independent bookstore – recommended it.
It was through this list that I learned of Darling Girls. It made the list in May, 2024 and was recommended by Sharon Davis at Book Bound Bookstore in Blairsville, GA. This is how Sharon Davis describes it: “Sally Hepworth has masterfully crafted another suspense about families, secrets, lies, and love. Three foster sisters struggle to deal with their horrific past when a child’s bones are found under the foster home where they grew up.”
To expand upon that a bit, the three foster “sisters” are not related by blood, but they feel like sisters because of their shared experience at Wild Meadows, which is the residence owned by Holly Fairchild, their foster mother.
When the book opens, we meet each of these females as adults. We only learn about their childhood through flashbacks. What struck me most about the book was how much their adulthood was an outgrowth of their childhood. Here are the three women now…
Jessica is a super organized woman who owns her own business – she helps others organize their homes. As we first meet her, she has just completed a three hour job of “painstakingly ordering her client’s bathroom cabinets into a Pinterest-worthy vision of color-coded, labeled, and stackable containers.”
Norah is a woman full of anger. When we meet her, she is on a first date with Kevin, a man who has disappointed her from the get go. On the dating site “he professed to be ‘interesting,’ yet he’d already mentioned his passion for Dungeons & Dragons twice.” When she gets a phone call and goes outside the restaurant to take it, he follows her out which displeases her so much, she punches him, leaving him on the pavement with his nose spurting blood.
And then there is Alicia, a soft-hearted woman who works in foster care, thoroughly understanding the children with whom she works as she tries to find homes for them.
The three women are close in age. Only eighteen months separate them. When they first start living under the same roof as children, Jessica is thirteen, Alicia is twelve, and Norah, eleven.
Of course, their experience at the foster home was similar, and yet it was different due to their age upon arrival and length of stay. Jessica lived at Wild Meadows from the age of four until fourteen. Norah was there from the age of ten to thirteen, and Alicia was only there from the age of twelve to thirteen. She was supposed to be in foster care temporarily as the grandmother who raised her was in the hospital. But then the grandmother did not survive her hospital stay.
Beside the shared issues of their childhood, each of the women has a current problem. Jessica has been accused by a variety of clients of stealing prescription drugs from them. Norah has a long history of assaulting others and after her last offense, the judge promised her prison time if she was ever back in court again. And Alicia is very guarded about love having had her grandmother’s love pulled away from her so abruptly.
All of these concerns get put on hold when the women are contacted by the police and told that Wild Meadows had been demolished recently to build a McDonald’s, and that the excavators uncovered human bones in the process. They are asked to come back to the area to answer questions about their time at Wild Meadows.
A lot happens when they do so. Beyond being interrogated and becoming suspects in the crime, they also come face to face with Holly Fairchild again. Through all this, they are forced to face up to the past. And since their past is so tied to their present, it helps them face up to their current day problems as well.
All three of the women are likable characters, even Norah whose dukes are always up. And so the reader hopes for happily ever after for them. Really, haven’t they suffered enough already?
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More on the Indie Next List:
I was interested to note that three other books I have reviewed were on the May, 2024 Indie Next List. Here are the booksellers and the bookstores that recommended each plus links to my reviews of those titles.
Bookseller: Caitlyn Lyles
Bookstore: Hooked Community, Lansing, MI
Their blurb: “A compulsively readable novel that follows a middle-aged artist as she undergoes a sexual and spiritual awakening. I loved this meditation on aging, restlessness, isolation, obsession, and the trials and triumphs of self-reinvention.”
*****
Bookseller: Luisa Smith
Bookstore: Book Passage, Corte Madera, CA
Their blurb: “Simon Van Booy performs a special type of alchemy by taking the simplest of tales — a woman approaching the end of her life discovering a small mouse in her house — and turning it into an astonishingly moving story of love and resilience.”
*****
Bookseller: Susan Taylor
Bookstore: Book House of Stuyvesant Plaza, Albany, NY
Their blurb: “A charming novel about the power of books to heal, connect, and teach. A prison inmate, her reading group teacher, and the man damaged by the inmate’s crime are drawn together by their love of reading and their need for human connection.”
*****
Click here to learn more about Darling Girls on Amazon.
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And a final note:
Thank you for reading this review. It would mean the world to me if you would subscribe to my blog/newsletter. You will receive exactly 28 emails from me in a year’s time. They will include 4 reports for book lovers and 24 slice-of-life blogs. Thanks for considering this. Lorie
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