This was a beautiful, heartfelt, and heartbreaking story set in the late 40’s. It gives a glimpse both at the awful houses for unwed mothers were being run, shows yet another dark side to adoption facilitation, and how racism and discrimination even between light and dark skinned black people, let alone white and black individuals, was so entrenched and commonplace.

The book follows one poor, black teenage girl in an impossible relationship with a white Jewish boy, and a black college student finding herself in love and married to a rich, light-skinned black doctor whose family was trying to make a place for themselves in between two worlds, in 1948. The difficulties both of them faced in their own circumstances and the parallels in both their lives even though their environments were so different. Not just the houses for unwed mother, but the market for adoption, greed for those facilitating it, and awful practices I’ve read here and elsewhere is unbelievable.

I admire so much the tenacity to overcome and find a better situation for themselves and their children was for both women despite such an enormously uphill battle, and I loved the grace and humility that Eleanor and her family eventually found with each other.

Thanks to Netgalley for the advanced copy of this book. All opinions are mine.