The Lies They Told
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
In rural 1930s Virginia, a young immigrant mother fights for her dignity and those she loves against America’s rising eugenics movement – when widespread support for policies of prejudice drove imprisonment and forced sterilizations based on class, race, disability, education, and country of origin – in this tragic and uplifting novel of social injustice, survival, and hope for readers of Susan Meissner, Kristin Hannah, and Christina Baker Kline.
When Lena Conti—a young, unwed mother—sees immigrant families being forcibly separated on Ellis Island, she vows not to let the officers take her two-year old daughter. But the inspection process is more rigorous than she imagined, and she is separated from her mother and teenage brother, who are labeled burdens to society, denied entry, and deported back to Germany. Now, alone but determined to give her daughter a better life after years of living in poverty and near starvation, she finds herself facing a future unlike anything she had envisioned.
Silas Wolfe, a widowed family relative, reluctantly brings Lena and her daughter to his weathered cabin in Virginia’s Blue Ridge Mountains to care for his home and children. Though the hills around Wolfe Hollow remind Lena of her homeland, she struggles to adjust. Worse, she is stunned to learn the children in her care have been taught to hide when the sheriff comes around. As Lena meets their neighbors, she realizes the community is vibrant and tight knit, but also senses growing unease. The State of Virginia is scheming to paint them as ignorant, immoral, and backwards so they can evict them from their land, seize children from parents, and deal with those possessing “inferior genes.”
After a social worker from the Eugenics Office accuses Lena of promiscuity and feeblemindedness, her own worst fears come true. Sent to the Virginia State Colony for the Feebleminded and Epileptics, Lena faces impossible choices in hopes of reuniting with her daughter—and protecting the people, and the land, she has grown to love.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Wiseman (The Lost Girls of Willowbrook) draws on the history of the eugenics movement in America for this harrowing story. Upon arriving at Ellis Island in 1928, the German Conti family is torn apart when immigration officials deem teenager Enzo unfit for work, forcing him and his mother to return to Germany. Left alone in the U.S. are Enzo's unmarried sister, Lena, and her young daughter, Ella. Silas Wolfe, the distant relative and widower who paid Enzo's and his mother's passage so they could work at his home in the Blue Ridge mountains of Virginia, reluctantly agrees to take on Lena and Ella instead. Lena's hope for a better life soars until she learns from Silas that government officials and eugenicists are seeking to declare him and his children feeble-minded, as part of a scheme to take his land. The eugenicists also target Lena, accusing her of promiscuity, leading her to make life-altering choices to protect her daughter. The fast-paced plot gains momentum as Lena grapples with her sense of powerlessness. It's a clear-eyed and resonant portrait of an ignominious era.
