The Home for Unwanted Girls

Goodman (The Finishing School) immerses readers in post-WWII Quebec, where hostilities divide French- and English-speakers, in this moving if at times predictable coming-of-age novel. The daughter of a once-impoverished French woman and a middle-class English-speaking father, 15-year-old Maggie Hughes chooses to be English. Despite her father’s warnings that French boys are poor, “don’t finish school,” and have rotten teeth by 40, Maggie falls in love with Gabriel Phénix, the humble French boy living in a crammed shack on the cornfield bordering her family’s property. Their brief summer romance comes to an end when Maggie discovers she’s pregnant and her parents give her two options—give her baby to an orphanage or live in poverty with Gabriel. Fear of being disowned by her family leads Maggie to give up her daughter, Elodie. As the years pass, Maggie’s decision never ceases to haunt her, especially when she discovers that orphanages are being converted into mental institutions. While the third-person perspective works well for Maggie’s character, it comes off as unrealistic and forced in chapters about the younger Elodie (“She’s old enough and clever enough to understand that life as she knew it is over”). Still, Goodman writes with passion about a dark episode in Quebec’s recent past. Agent: Beverly Slopen, Beverly Slopen Literary (Canada). (Apr.)