I love this story. I love the historical insight that is a part of our country we never acknowledge. I love the balance of character perspective. I love Lynnie and Kate and Homan.
I so appreciate the authors ability to relate horribly ugly situations and characters without becoming overly graphic. She took the reader to those places and introduced them to those characters and brought the scene or character to life vividly without resorting to cheap unnecessary graphicness.
There are parts of this book where you have to suspend belief because there are some gaps and some things that would really take extraordinary events for it to play out the way it did. I was able to do that because I did care about the characters.
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Lynnie can't process things and speak, so her parents institutionalize her. It's nothing more than a warehouse for lost souls, so her limited capacity to learn is further hindered. She is raped one night & gives birth with a deaf man's help to a baby girl. They escape the "school", finally landing at an old lady's farm, where they hide in the attic with the baby. Lynnie is dragged back to the school, the man escapes (although everyone believes him dead) and the old lady raises the baby. Many years later, Lynnie's sister finds her and the baby, of course now grown. And the deaf man has settled in a shore town with a lighthouse, thinking that eventually Lynnie will find him, which she does. ( )

This was a great, heart-wrenching read. The way people with mental disabilities were treated "back in the day" was deplorable. Made me research some of the places where they were kept.
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Beautiful girl was placed in the " School for the Incurable and Feebleminded" by her family and forgotten; as were most of the other residents. (1968) This is a story of heartbreak but also resilience as well as some good luck. It was a good story even if a bit sappy at the end. ( )

The changing character perspectives from chapter to chapter made this a hard one to get into for me, but in the end I thought it was very good. Interesting, heartbreaking glimpse into the world of mid-20th century institutionalization of the developmentally disabled, and a good story too. ( )