Keeping Lucy
A Novel
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- $13.99
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- $13.99
Publisher Description
"This story will have readers not only rooting for Ginny and Lucy, but thinking about them long after the last page is turned." -- Lisa Wingate, New York Times Bestselling Author of Before We Were Yours
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The heartbreaking and uplifting story, inspired by incredible true events, of how far one mother must go to protect her daughter.
Dover, Massachusetts, 1969. Ginny Richardson's heart was torn open when her baby girl, Lucy, born with Down Syndrome, was taken from her. Under pressure from his powerful family, her husband, Ab, sent Lucy away to Willowridge, a special school for the “feeble-minded." Ab tried to convince Ginny it was for the best. That they should grieve for their daughter as though she were dead. That they should try to move on.
But two years later, when Ginny's best friend, Marsha, shows her a series of articles exposing Willowridge as a hell-on-earth--its squalid hallways filled with neglected children--she knows she can't leave her daughter there. With Ginny's six-year-old son in tow, Ginny and Marsha drive to the school to see Lucy for themselves. What they find sets their course on a heart-racing journey across state lines—turning Ginny into a fugitive.
For the first time, Ginny must test her own strength and face the world head-on as she fights Ab and his domineering father for the right to keep Lucy. Racing from Massachusetts to the beaches of Atlantic City, through the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia to a roadside mermaid show in Florida, Keeping Lucy is a searing portrait of just how far a mother’s love can take her.
"A heartrending yet inspiring novel that kept me reading late into the night.” —Kristina McMorris, New York Times bestselling author of Sold on a Monday and The Edge of Lost
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Greenwood (Rust & Stardust) delivers an unabashed heart-tugger. The year is 1969 when housewife Ginny Richardson, of Dover, Mass., gives birth to a baby girl named Lucy, who has Down syndrome. Her lawyer husband, Abbott Jr. , and his overbearing lawyer father, Abbott Sr., convince her to have the newborn institutionalized. But two years later, after the institute is exposed on TV as a hellhole of neglect and mistreatment, a guilt-ridden Ginny spirits Lucy out of the place and hits the road with her daughter, unaware that she gave up parental rights and could be wanted for kidnapping. Accompanied by her six-year-old son, Peyton, and best friend, Marsha, Ginny drives to Florida to hide out with Marsha's sister, a mermaid performer at Weeki Wachee Springs. On the way, Ginny tries to make up for lost time with Lucy. But she knows a reckoning with Abbott Jr., Abbott Sr., and the law is inevitable. The author makes Ginny's transformation from timid housewife to empowered guardian an affecting one. And in Ginny's road trip from Massachusetts to Florida by way of Atlantic City and the Blue Ridge Mountains, Greenwood explores a country caught between traditional values and the societal changes of the 1960s and '70s. This is a moving depiction of the primal power of a mother's love.
