The Home for Unwanted Girls by Joanna Goodman

As time passes, the stories of Maggie and Elodie intertwine but never touch, until Maggie realizes she must take what she wants from life and go in search of her long-lost daughter, finally reclaiming the truth that has been denied them both. Maggie, married to a businessman eager to start a family, cannot forget the daughter she was forced to abandon, and a chance reconnection with Gabriel spurs a wrenching choice.

Bright and determined, Elodie withstands abysmal treatment at the nuns’ hands, finally earning her freedom at seventeen, when she is thrust into an alien, often unnerving world. It’s a precarious enough existence that takes a tragic turn when Elodie, along with thousands of other orphans in Quebec, is declared mentally ill as the result of a new law that provides more funding to psychiatric hospitals than to orphanages. When she becomes pregnant at fifteen, her parents force her to give baby Elodie up for adoption and get her life ‘back on track’.Įlodie is raised in Quebec’s impoverished orphanage system. But Maggie’s heart is captured by Gabriel Phénix. Maggie’s English-speaking father has ambitions for his daughter that don’t include marriage to the poor French boy on the next farm over. In 1950s Quebec, French and English tolerate each other with precarious civility-much like Maggie Hughes’ parents. Philomena meets Orphan Train in this suspenseful, provocative novel filled with love, secrets, and deceit-the story of a young unwed mother who is forcibly separated from her daughter at birth and the lengths to which they go to find each other.

The Home for Unwanted Girls by Joanna Goodman