📚 Book Tour + Review 📚
Title: The Fallen Woman’s Daughter
Author: Michelle Cox
Publisher: Woolton Press
Genre: Historical Fiction
Thank you @tlcbooktours + @michellecoxwrites for the #gifted copy and having on this book tour!
Compelling. Somber. Coming-of-Age. Flawed Characters. Family Drama. Multigenerational.
From the very first page until I closed this book, I was glued to this story! Though, parts of this book are truly heartbreaking or deal with tough subject matters, I simply couldn’t look away.
In 1923, Gertie with her parents and eleven siblings visit a traveling carnival passing through their small coal mining town of Southern Iowa. Gertie may only be seventeen, but she has big dreams of traveling the world. At the carnival, she meets the barker and falls under his spell and false illusions that she will traveling along with him after impulsively marrying him. Instead, she goes on to have kids and after a series of wrong choices, twists and turns ends up with the State taking away her daughters, eight year old Nora and six year old Patsy.
It’s 1932, and Nora and Patsy are sent to the Park Ridge School for Girls. This may sound like an elite private school, but the conditions there and one particular teacher will absolutely break your heart make you think otherwise. Finally, the girls settle in when they come to terms that their mother will not be coming to get them, visiting or writing letters.
The story continues on through the early 60s as we watch the girls grow up and have their own families. We watch Gertie make peace with her life of choices.
“You did the best you could, Gertie. You made mistakes, sure, but we all have.”
In the authors note she says this story is based on a true story that she heard from a resident in a nursing home. I imagine this was why there are so many layers of sadness in this book. Note there is sexual, child, emotional and physical abuse. The different eras of this book really shine through.
This book is out now!
Purchasing from the link below supports independent bookstores and my site!