Fiction by Joanna Goodman
At the beginning of this story, sixteen-year-old Maggie finds herself pregnant and shuffled away from her home to live with distant relatives for a year to hide her shame. It's 1950 in Quebec, and keeping the baby seems out of the question. Maggie doesn't even tell her boyfriend Gabriel, who is unsuitable for her in any case, according to her parents. Baby Elodie is sent to the orphanage, the eponymous Home for Unwanted Girls.
This was a good story which explored a lot of cultural/historical facts I was quite unaware of. I'm not from Canada and was not familiar with the French vs. English politics of Quebec, or the "Duplessis Orphans" who were abused and neglected by the government of Quebec and (allegedly) the Catholic Church during the mid-twentieth century. (Look it up in wikipedia.) So there was a lot of history here for me to learn.
Still, the point of a story is, well, the story. And this was a good story about a girl who gives up her baby and hopes to find it again.
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