Thank you to NetGalley and RB Media, Recorded Books for the audiobook version of this book. I am not affiliated with or compensated in any way for my review.
This book is amazing. To be totally honest I liked the coverof this book- I didn't read the snippet on the book. I literally chose this book solely based on the beautiful cover. I am so happy that I did! This book got me from the very first word. I was able to finish this book in just a few hours- it was so good I couldn't put it down.
Lorraine is an only child who has it all- upstanding family-smart- has big dreams. She thinks she has the perfect boyfriend- they end up having sex one time before he goes off to college and well she ends up pregnant. He comes home for a holiday and she tells him she pregnant. when he goes home he calls her and demands she go see him- she doesnt go. She ends up telling her parents and they sent her to a home for females in her predicament. she has an amazing story- you'll just need to read it to find out what happened!

What a beautiful story made even better by the narration of Susan Bennett.

Lorraine is the all-American girl who discovers she is pregnant. Her parents send her to a maternity home to have the baby. The story makes you sad and angry and wonder how these things could happen.

Meagan Church has written another winner!!!

5 stars!!!

Thank you, NetGalley for this advanced audiobook for review! Beautiful and moving story set in the 1960’s of an ambitious young girl who ends up pregnant and her journey. I really wanted to read this book as stories like this are both beautiful, but heart wrenching and accurate of the time period that the girls were the only ones held accountable for getting pregnant and faced the consequences by being sent away with stories of “caring for a sick aunt” and being forced to give away their baby against their will. Although young girls are no longer forced to give up their babies these days and some of the stigma of single parents has abated, I definitely think society still holds women more accountable for pregnancy and child-related anything more than partners.

The Girls We Sent Away
By: Meagan Church
5💛💛💛💛💛

After reading The Last Carolina girl, I knew I had to read more by this author.
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1960’s-
Lorraine is in high school and looking forward to being valedictorian and college. She becomes pregnant and ends up being cut off by her boyfriend who is in college and does not want the child.
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Her mother sends her to a home of unwanted mothers, and this was extremely difficult for Lorraine. She finds a kindred spirit in someone who sees her potential.
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It’s amazing what Lorraine went through and how much she wants her baby. This story is full of love, heartbreak, hope and secrets.
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I highly recommend this novel. This novel is due out March 5, 2024.

#thegirlswesentaway, #meganchurch, #soucebookslandmark, #bookstagram, #booksconnectus, #bookreview, #stamperlady50

I love this narrator! She is amazing and she nailed this story!
This entire book had me holding my breath. I am so grateful that I do not need to be "a lady" now in 2024. I am not good at it.
I felt for Loraine.
I am the granddaughter of a girl who went away. She was a young teen and the father was a fully grown man. I never met her. We found out who she is via DNA but she had passed away years before then, so we don't know her full story but I can imagine.
I think nowadays we forget how painful the baby scoop era was for these young women.
I loved it basically. This was wonderful!

This book is so very relevant during this time again. Men and politicians want to dictate what women do with their bodies without ever being held accountable. Men can walk away from everything, but women bare down. If you haven't heard of The Baby Scoop Era, this period, roughly from the late 1940s to the early 1970s, is when many unmarried pregnant women were often coerced, pressured, or forced to relinquish their babies for adoption. As widespread social stigma was attached to unwed mothers, many saw adoption as a more socially acceptable outcome than single motherhood. "Strength isn't in the loud and obvious. Strength is often camouflaged in the quiet, reserved places where most people wouldn't think to look. It's grown in the moments when we give up things along the way." Trauma is trauma and in this situation, the physical, emotional and mental impact was epic. The author is thoroughly explains the history, research, and inspiration behind the story she has created, which adds another layer of richness to the novel. Well-crafted and researched, this timely, powerful novel is a tribute to many lives irrevocably changed by the tumultuous Baby Scoop era. I would definitely continue reading books by this author. Thank you to NetGalley, Sourcebooks Landmark and Meagan Church

Thank you to NetGalley and RB Media for an advance copy of this audiobook.

In the summer of 1964, in a suburban town of North Carolina, Lorraine and Clint are about as “storybook” a teenage couple as can be found. They are respectable middle-class kids from respectable middle-class families. They have good manners, clean-cut appearances, academic and career ambitions. They love swimming and football. Clint is heading off to college in the fall. Lorraine is finishing her senior year of high school, then plans to go to college. Her big dream—enormous for women of her time—is to become an astronaut. She does want the husband and family and suburban ranch house, just not any time soon. That, too, is an enormous dream for women of her time, who marry young, have babies, and settle into domesticity.

Clint, the “normal male” prototype, wants sex before his leave-taking. Lorraine likes the idea of it, but adheres to the conventions against premarital sex. Until she lets herself be persuaded by a suddenly romantic Clint, who not only declares his everlasting love but also presents her with a “promise ring”. Her reluctance to consider what that implies makes him consent to calling it a going-away gift, and she accepts that and wears it on her right hand. She also accedes to the sex that seems to be part of the deal. A perfunctory event in an abandoned old house, it is not exactly romantic.

And so, as can be expected, is the outcome. Incredibly, for a girl so intelligent, responsible and ambitious, with a boyfriend described the same way, she is completely ignorant of sex and pregnancy. This seems a bit of a stretch—even the prudery of small town southern society in the 1960s couldn’t eliminate all possibilities of learning a little something. In any event, the now pregnant unwed Lorraine is destined to suffer the same fate of young women of her class and period. She is hurried off to one of the infamous “homes” that is anything but, to await the birth of her baby, enduring the emotional and physical abuse that is believed to be deserved by these “sinful” girls. The quick adoption of their “illegitimate” child without their consent or even knowledge, and without any information about where they were sent, is also the common result.

The author sets Lorraine’s struggle in the midst of the very real “baby scoop” of the 1960s that lasted well into the 1970s. Many families wanted healthy white babies. Young unwed mothers were given no alternatives. Most could not raise a child on the wages women of the time could earn, especially if their families were unsupportive. If they didn’t marry the father, their marriage prospects as “fallen women” with an “illegitimate” child in hand were slim. There were no resources available to them to make a success of single parenting. Their own families were often too ashamed to offer support. Spiriting off both mother and child were offered as the best solutions all round. They were meant to forget each other and start fresh.

Meagan Church writes about a sad subject with compassion and empathy, capturing what it meant to come of age as a middle class boy or girl in the years she considers. She is especially good at depicting the barriers to personal fulfilment that everyone had to contend with in order to fit in, where everyone is attuned since birth to notice “differences” and find ways to shun the different. She has thoroughly researched the baby scoop, and provides a fascinating summary of the episode and her sources in her epilogue. Lorraine’s story is a part of social history that seems hardly believable in the 21st century, yet some aspects of it are not so different from how single mothers fare even today.

I listened to the audiobook and the narrator was a perfect choice for this book. The writing was beautiful and the story was full of well developed characters and such an emotional storyline. This isn’t my usual genre but the synopsis looked so intriguing I had to read it. Highly recommend this one!

This was such a moving story of a young woman, Lorraine, sent to a maternity home after her skeevy boyfriend, Clint, impregnates her at the beginning of her senior year of high school. The contrast between how the pregnancy affects her and Clint, when he was the one who pushed for sex, is heartbreaking!

The story feature lots of tragedy and injustice, but there’s also friendship, generosity, and, most of all, hope. It’s an important story and I’m glad to see it told so well!

📚 Series or Standalone: standalone
📚 Genre: historical fiction
📚 Target Age Group: adult
📚 Cliffhanger: no

✨ Will I Reread: maybe
✨ Recommended For: everyone should read this honestly, but generally I think fans of Where the Crawdads Sing and The Trouble with You will love this

💕 Characters: 5/5
💕 Writing: 4/5
💕 Plot: 4/5
💕 Pacing: 4/5
💕 Unputdownability: 4/5
💕 Enjoyment: 4/5
💕 Book Cover: 5/5

Thanks, NetGalley and Sourcebooks, for the gifted ARC in exchange for an honest review.