I grew up having a vague idea of what happened to the Dionne quintuplets - they were the first surviving quints, and were taken from their parents by the Ontario government and basically put on display. It’s a dark spot in Canadian history. The girls were treated like zoo animals, complete with viewing hours as they played in their fenced-in playground. They were cruelly exploited, plain and simple.

The girls were incredibly isolated, never meeting other children or leaving the hospital they called home; their only friends were the nurses and teachers hired to care for them. I now understand why the surviving sisters have struggled so much in their senior years - that isolation sabotaged their social and general life skills.

But how is the book itself? Wood researched the heck out of it, and didn’t hold back on any of the awful bits. The story is formatted as a series of journal entries, news articles and letters. The central character is a (fictional) nurse, who cares for the girls from birth through to their toddler years. I think she represents the reader, looking from the outside in. It’s really an interesting perspective to read about; at first she truly believes that what they were doing was good for the girls.

Near the end of the book, the story took a jarring and drastic turn. I struggled with it - it seemed very out of place and pulled me out of the narrative. But the rest of it was fantastic.