Of Better Blood
-
- $16.99
-
- $16.99
Publisher Description
Teenage polio survivor Rowan Collier is caught in the crossfire of a secret war against "the unfit." It's 1922, and eugenics—the movement dedicated to racial purity and good breeding—has taken hold in America. State laws allow institutions to sterilize minorities, the "feeble-minded," and the poor, while local eugenics councils set up exhibits at county fairs with "fitter family" contests and propaganda. After years of being confined to hospitals, Rowan is recruited at sixteen to play a born cripple in a county fair eugenics exhibit. But gutsy, outspoken Dorchy befriends Rowan and helps her realize her own inner strength and bravery. The two escape the fair and end up at a summer camp on a desolate island run by the New England Eugenics Council. There they discover something is happening to the children. Rowan must find a way to stop the horrors on the island…if she can escape them herself.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
After polio impaired Rowan Collier's legs, her highbred father and sister sent her to the Boston Home for Crippled Children. Several years later, in 1922, 16-year-old Rowan is reluctantly performing in the "Unfit Family" show run by the New England Betterment Council to highlight types of people (including polio victims like Rowan, who walks with a limp) worth sterilizing. Rowan gains confidence thanks to new friend Dorchy, and the girls eventually escape to Cape Cod, only to wind up working for the Council once again at an island camp in Maine. When clever Rowan discovers the deadly plans that the adults on the island have for the "unfit" young campers, she vows to stop them. The book's meandering first half means that it takes some time to reach the gripping island plot, but Moger (Teaching the Diary of Anne Frank) adeptly handles the novel's historical aspects and wisely avoids a too-neat resolution, given that eugenic beliefs and forced sterilizations persisted in this country long after Rowan's story ends. It's an engaging introduction to a rarely discussed piece of history. Ages 13 up.
