It's not often that an author's foreword already makes me raise my eyebrows, which is exactly what happened here, and it made me a little concerned about the book before I even truly began. Here, let me share the things that made me say, "hold on... what the fuck?" before the story even started. The author starts with a broad-strokes introduction to the history of Laurelton State Village for Feeble-minded Women of Childbearing Age, an institution where women who were deemed "mentally or morally defective" (that is, anything from being a lesbian or a prostitute to simply a woman who wasn't obedient to her husband) were imprisoned so that they couldn't bring more children with similar "defects" into the world. Lovely. She then continues:
"At the helm of this profitable public institution was a fascinating superintendent named Dr. Mary Wolfe. Dr. Wolfe had earned a medical degree when few women went to college. She was one of our nation's first female psychiatrists, an outspoken leader of the women's suffrage movement of the 1910s, and a brilliant public speaker. She was an early feminist, a crusader for women's civil rights, and an advocate for the health and welfare of women. At first glance, it was easy for me to see why my grandmother would want to work for such an intelligent, modern-thinking woman."
I'm sorry??? You just said all that about the institution and yet you think the woman who literally founded it was in any way an advocate for women's health? I know that "women's rights" back then were not exactly the same as we would define them today, but still... this is a pretty big leap... and then on the next page she quotes another passage "written by another celebrated feminist, a champion of women's reproductive rights, and also, like many other progressives of her era, an avid eugenicist". At this point I was utterly confused. Segregating women so they could literally not have children on the off chance that they would turn out "defective" is literally the opposite of championing women's reproductive rights. At least the blurb of the book mentioned something about the institution's dark secrets coming to light, so I didn't think the author was actually suggesting that these ideas were good or the women who espoused them worthy of praise. But the way all of it was worded... I went into the book with more apprehension than excitement after this foreword.
Thankfully, I was proved wrong. There a lot more postitives than negatives to be found in the book. For starters, the main character, Mary Engle, is great. I don't mean in the sense that she's a great person that I'd love to hang out with... hell, I'm not even sure I would call her likable. But she's quite different from most fictional heroines out there, in a way that makes her feel real, more like an actual person than a character in a story. She's ambitious, insecure, yet arrogant, desperate for validation, and one of the most believably reluctant heroes that I've yet seen in fiction. She is also, quite appropriately for her time, a pretty big racist (oh she insists that she doesn't have any problem with "colored people" and seems to be against slavery, but she has her prejudices all the same). Which is not something you often get to read about these days, is it? Normally even in historical fiction books it's the other characters who are terrible and backwards, while the protagonost is a shining example of modernity and progressivism. Not here, though, and honestly, I loved that. It felt authentic, and also fit in with everything else about the character, her upbringing, uptightness, and shall we say naiveté... the latter of which was the one thing I felt was a tad bit overdone. Yes she's only eighteen and doesn't have the benefit of historical hindsight that I the reader have, so it makes sense that she wouldn't immediately suspect her crooked boss of, well, crookedness... but around the fifth time she vehemently defended her when other characters kept insisting that she was shady, it was a bit too much.
I guess this was the one big reason that kept taking me out of the story and made me unable to fully emphatise with the character - the practice of locking up perfectly healthy women and declaring them mentally ill is so well-known today that I just couldn't get into a mindset where it wasn't. So all throughout I had this really curious mixed feeling of being appreciative that the author clearly strived for historical accuracy when describing the situation through Mary's eyes (including the numerous references to the inmates being "morons" and "idiots", which were simple medical terms at the time), and at the same time whishing that Mary had at least some of our modern understanding of the situation. I kept thinking, what will it take for you to realize what's really going on? Can't you just open your eyes and see? But when she did, I wasn't entirely satisfied either. After all that build up, the big revelation was rather quickly dealt with. It's even described as a single moment when she stopped being a naive child and finally became an adult, but that's not really how that works, is it? Up until that point the building of suspense and all the little breadcrumbs that she had to connect were excellent, so I was pretty disappointed with the actual "aha!" scene.
There were some other minor scruples I had with the book, like how the past tense narration of Mary was played entirely straight with every minute detail of her days imparted to the reader, up until the point when out of nowhere she started obfuscating and hiding things, just so that a later twist could work better. I thought this was unnecessary, and it would have worked equally well if she just continued the straightforward narration. Also there were still a few 21st century ideas seeping through, like when she referred to Hemingway, Conrad, and Kipling as "manly authors". I've never really seen this viewpoint of them up until recently, and I don't think many people thought this in the 20s. Not to mention that later Mary mentions how much she hates Jane Austen, so wouldn't that illustrate how silly the idea of manly and womanly authors really is? But other than this, the book has everything going for it. The characters, the writing, the story, the atmosphere... I'm looking forward to reading more from this author in the future.
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