The Lies They Told

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Synopsis

In rural 1930s Virginia, a young immigrant mother fights for her dignity and those she loves against America’s rising eugenics movement – when widespread support for policies of prejudice drove imprisonment and forced sterilizations based on class, race, disability, education, and country of origin – in this tragic and uplifting novel of social injustice, survival, and hope for readers of Susan Meissner, Kristin Hannah, and Christina Baker Kline.

When Lena Conti—a young, unwed mother—sees immigrant families being forcibly separated on Ellis Island, she vows not to let the officers take her two-year old daughter. But the inspection process is more rigorous than she imagined, and she is separated from her mother and teenage brother, who are labeled burdens to society, denied entry, and deported back to Germany. Now, alone but determined to give her daughter a better life after years of living in poverty and near starvation, she finds herself facing a future unlike anything she had envisioned.

Silas Wolfe, a widowed family relative, reluctantly brings Lena and her daughter to his weathered cabin in Virginia’s Blue Ridge Mountains to care for his home and children. Though the hills around Wolfe Hollow remind Lena of her homeland, she struggles to adjust. Worse, she is stunned to learn the children in her care have been taught to hide when the sheriff comes around. As Lena meets their neighbors, she realizes the community is vibrant and tight knit, but also senses growing unease. The State of Virginia is scheming to paint them as ignorant, immoral, and backwards so they can evict them from their land, seize children from parents, and deal with those possessing “inferior genes.”

After a social worker from the Eugenics Office accuses Lena of promiscuity and feeblemindedness, her own worst fears come true. Sent to the Virginia State Colony for the Feebleminded and Epileptics, Lena face impossible choices in hopes of reuniting with her daughter—and protecting the people, and the land, she has grown to love. 

Synopsis source: The StoryGraph

Review

Genre(s): Historical Fiction
HB&W Rating: 4 stars | 5 flames
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The blurb for this book states that it is “for readers of Susan Meissner, Kristin Hannah, and Christina Baker Kline.” That’s a tough description to live up to, but I believe The Lies They Told did just that. This is not an easy, feel-good read, but it is definitely a book that will make you feel.

From the arrival at Ellis Island and the invasive and dehumanizing immigration process to the nightmare of forced institutionalization and sterilization of “undesirables,” this book takes a hard look at American Eugenics and how pervasive it was. It was maddening and infuriating and devastating. I had to pause on it for a few days because it got pretty heavy in the last third of the book and parts definitely had me reaching the tissues.

The thing that prevented me giving it a full 5 stars was that I was frustrated by some of the choices Lena upon first moving to the Wolfe farm. The choices she made went against what people who knew better than her had advised her specifically concerning the safety of children in her care. I couldn’t for the life of me understand why she thought she would have the experience to make the decisions she did rather than heeding the warnings she received. It’s obvious that she was scared and fear makes us act irrationally. Additionally, I had to remind myself that she was young and naive, still learning English and local customs etc., so her actions were plausible—infuriating and alarming, yes, but plausible. I believe this was all to set the major plot in motion, but those people didn’t need excuses to act as heinously as they did, Lena’s actions just sped up the process.

Bad choices aside, what makes this story is the rich realization of this dark part of history. The situations, the fear, the utter helplessness of it all felt incredibly real. My own great-grandparents came through Ellis Island right about the same time as Lena and her family, and it made me wish my grandpa was still alive to see if his parents ever talked about their experiences. The depth of the betrayal at the hands of our government should be unfathomable, but we only have to look in the news to see how much this story resonates today.

If you’re a fan of well-researched historical fiction that tells of some of the darker parts of US History with an unflinching, evocative voice, then you’ll enjoy this novel.

Until next time,

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