Read This Book . . .

In 1950s North Carolina, Edie finds out she’s pregnant. She’s a senior in high school and her boyfriend, Simon, is in med school. So it wouldn’t be uncommon for girls in her situation to get married. But Simon is Jewish, and neither her parents, nor his, have any interest in a wedding. Instead, they send Edie to a home for unwed mothers where Edie is told she will give birth to her baby, which will then be adopted. But Edie refuses to budge, and has her own ideas of what fate will await her baby.

Edie’s best friend Luce, the child of two divorced parents, didn’t have any friends until Edie came to town. To her, Edie’s absence feels immense, but she determines to find a way to help Edie have more options for her life, even if that means that Edie keeps her baby.

Decades later in 1984, Luce’s daughter Meera discovers that she’s pregnant. As Meera begins to explore her options, Luce is thrown back to the past when she watched another woman she loved have an unexpected pregnancy.

In many ways, Edie and Luce’s world is a bleak one, full of middle class women trying to give the appearance that their lives are in perfect order. But the closer you look at their lives, the more you realize that women have few other options. And underneath all of the frills and plastered-on smiles is a world where women are born into a society that has already decided what their futures will entail. This novel is about choices, both the ones women do have and the ones they don’t.

Franks’ prose flows across the page, and her storytelling is immersive. She possesses such an intimate understanding of her characters. I started the book and found that I couldn’t stop reading. I needed to know what the future had in store for these characters. They just seemed so alive.