I had never heard of the “Duplessis Orphans” until I read The Home for Unwanted Girls. It’s a harrowing part of Canada’s history, and one that must’ve caused a lot of damage to the children who were affected. Basically, because hospitals received more funding than orphanages, some orphanages in Quebec rebranded themselves as psychiatric institutions and pretended that the orphans in their care all had mental health conditions. To keep up this facade, they subjected these orphans to unnecessary medication and electro-shock treatment, partly as a means of maintaining discipline, but also to continue receiving funds for their care.

Joanna Goodman’s novel is not an easy read, but neither is it a wholly depressing one. The story focuses on Maggie, a Quebecois teenager whose English father disapproves of many things French, and treats with somewhat mild disdain his French wife. When Maggie falls in love with Gabriel, a French boy at a neighbouring farm, her father’s disapproval forces her to keep the relationship secret, until she becomes pregnant and can no longer hide the truth. The book also weaves in the story of Elodie, Maggie and Gabriel’s daughter, who is sent to an orphanage and later to a psychiatric institution, and it is through her childlike perspective that we see the full extent of what these children were subjected to.

I loved learning about stuff in Canada’s history that were totally new to me, such as what happened to orphans in Quebec during that time period, and also the tensions between the English and French communities in Quebec in the mid-20th century. Goodman doesn’t shy away from portraying the bigotry from some of Maggie’s family and neighbours, nor does she pull back from showing us the extent of shame in being an unwed mother at the time.

I also loved Maggie’s story. She’s such a compelling character, and I loved how she developed from a somewhat naive and optimistic teenager to a determined woman pursuing her own brand of happiness. When she runs into Gabriel again as an adult, and decides to try to track Elodie down, I was cheering for her the entire way. I also love how she stuck to her dreams of running her father’s shop, and how even the risk of losing the possibility of a romance with Gabriel didn’t deter her from pursuing her own happiness.

The Home for Unwanted Girls is a fascinating and compelling story, and important in bringing light to a dark period in Canada’s past.

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Thank you to Harper Collins Canada for a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

What if technology could reduce human pregnancy from nine months to a mere nine weeks? In a world where women are expected to be able to do it all, such an invention has the potential to minimize the impact of pregnancy on other aspects of a woman’s life. Mother of Invention has an intriguing premise, and for the most part, the story moves at a quick and interesting pace.

The protagonist, Tessa Callahan, is the business/marketing half of Seahorse, a company that researches ways to reduce the biological burden of motherhood on women (named after an animal where it’s the male who carries embryos throughout the gestation period). Tessa and her business partner Luke Zimmerman, the son of a wealthy tech genius who wants to make his own mark in Silicon Valley, have developed what they call the Seahorse Solution. Its science is based on an unexplained series of nine-week births in the 1990s and early 2000s, whose babies appear to have grown up normal except for a cleft on the top of their head.

The story follows the first human trial of Seahorse, with Tessa supervising the pregnancies of three women volunteers. The work inspires complex feelings in Tessa, who had never wanted a child of her own until she and her husband tried to conceive and failed. Parallel to this narrative is that of the original accelerated gestation syndrome (AGS) babies and their mother. Without giving too much away, there’s a government conspiracy involved, and one of the babies, now 20, wanting to dig deeper into the mystery of the circumstances surrounding her birth.

I loved the story about the Seahorse Trial and the heightened emotions of the women involved. I also enjoyed the parts about the office politics between Luke and Tessa, and how Luke’s daddy issues lead to him making some unprofessional decisions in his work.

The story about the original AGS babies and the government conspiracy didn’t grab my interest as much. I liked the story about one of the mothers who had to deal with an accelerated pregnancy she didn’t understand and a baby she didn’t want, but the parts about the government agent and his guilt over his job due to the love he feels for an AGS woman weren’t as exciting. I think part of it is that this government agent was initially in love with the mother, and while he still has some affection for this mother, he now has romantic feelings for her daughter. That just really grossed me out, and even when this part of the story took a sweet and emotional turn, I just couldn’t get into it.

Still, the writing was strong, and I was enjoying the read until the end. Without giving away spoilers, Tessa makes a decision somewhere near the end of the book that just makes no sense to me given what we’ve seen of Tessa’s character so far. Worse, the twist happens so late in the book that things are tied up far too rapidly. There’s an odd time jump of several months just before the final chapter, and the result is that we don’t really have enough time to process the odd decision-making and the way things turn out.

There’s a lot of discussion throughout the book about the wisdom of shortening the gestation period, as perhaps women need the nine months to become ready — physically and psychologically — to become mothers. I wish this could’ve been explored a bit further, and perhaps the odd plot acceleration in the end was the author’s own way of demonstrating her stand. Either way, it’s an intriguing question, and the ending took me out of it.

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Thank you to Thomas Allen Ltd for a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

The Paris Seamstress is a wonderfully evocative novel about Estella, a seamstress and aspiring fashion designer in 1940s New York, and her granddaughter Fabienne in the present-day. A love for clothing and designs that women actually want to wear connects both women, and Lester does a masterful job in immersing us in Estella’s world.

I loved Estella’s story. I felt for how she had to give up her beloved mother and the life they shared in Paris, to save herself from the Germans and build a new life in New York. I love how realistic her work life felt, with her strong desire to create original, forward-thinking fashion, yet being constrained by her boss’s directive to simply copy fashions from Paris that are several seasons old and just making their way to America.

Most of all, I loved the romance she had with Alex, a British spy undercover as an American lawyer, and the complications that arise when she realizes Alex is dating a woman who disconcertingly looks exactly like Estella. I love how it forces Estella to come to terms with some uncomfortable truths about her mother’s past, and how these end up impacting Estella’s present life and future career. The historical background is ever-present, as Alex has to involve Estella in an important mission, and Estella then has to learn that her own personal concerns pale in comparison to the greater good of fighting against the Nazis.

The complications that keep Estella and Alex from their happily ever after become frustrating after a while, but it’s also a testament to the strength of Lester’s characters that I wanted so badly for the couple to just get together already. The twists and turns do become soap operatic after a while, but in a deliciously exciting way, and I loved seeing the family secrets unfold and spill over into Estella’s reality.

Fabienne’s half of the story, told in intersecting chapters throughout, is somewhat less compelling to me, though it may just be because the world she inhabits is a lot more familiar than the one Estella lives in. Fabienne is a fashion curator who is too intimidated by her grandmother’s legacy to pursue her own interest in fashion design. She meets a handsome stranger at the Met Gala celebrating a retrospective of Estella’s work, and the rest of her story is about gathering up the courage to pursue her heart both in romance and in her career. She also ends up discovering a mystery about her family’s past, and her untangling of this parallels Estella’s own investigation in the past.

The Paris Seamstress is a lush and evocative story, and it’s an absolute pleasure to lose oneself in during a quiet weekend. I absolutely loved all the talk about fashion, and all the glitzy glittery glamour of the worlds Lester describes. And I loved the romances and the way both women and their men had to learn to be courageous in the pursuit of their own happiness.

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Thank you to Forever Romance for an e-galley of this book in exchange for an honest review.