Unbroken Bonds

In Hogan's debut novel, a pregnant teenager's life is irrevocably changed when she's sent to a home and school for unwed mothers in conservative 1950s Tennessee. After 17-year-old Joanna Wilson becomes pregnant, she quickly finds herself in in a Southern gothic nightmare. She suffers physical abuse at the hands of her father, and her married lover, Jack Wyatt, who's still devoted to his injured wife, sends her off to the Frances Weston Home in Knoxville. It's a place for young unmarried women to give birth, away from the prying eyes of judgmental Tennessee society; for the women sequestered there, it's both a schoolhouse and a jail, where the wardens are stoic, "crowlike" nuns. This prisonlike setting, where everything beyond the house's gardens is off-limits, is fertile ground for Hogan to explore the culture and misogyny of a classist, racist 1950s and '60s America. The real horror of the home for unwed mothers, however, is not simply its restrictiveness, but what happens to the babies; they're put up for adoption, no matter what their mothers' wishes are, and the women never know exactly what becomes of their children. As time passes, the novel follows Joanna and others from the home as they enter adulthood, exploring how they grapple with the trauma of separation. Over the course of the novel, Hogan's prose is pared down but deliberate, reflecting the staid resilience of her central characters. The narrative, while alarming, is very much grounded in the reality of the time and place in which it's set. It's clear that many women in similar situations never received answers about what happened to their children, but in this novel, Hogan does offer a hint of relief. Overall, it's a narrative that builds slowly, hovering on a photograph as a missing piece in a puzzle, and coalescing in a resounding defense of women's reproductive autonomy. An elegantly written and damning narrative.

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August 27, 2021

DEBUT Hogan's debut looks at the difficulties young women faced in the days when teenage pregnancies and unwed mothers were stigmatized by society. In 1956 Nashville, 17-year-old Joanna discovers she's pregnant. Her parents are horrified; Jack, the father of her baby, is married and not in a position to leave his wife; and society is less than forgiving of unwed mothers. Joanna is shamed, disowned, and shipped off to a Catholic-run charity in Knoxville, where she is expected to give birth and then place her baby for adoption. There, she meets three girls who will become her lifelong friends: Jessie, Prissy, and Mary. As the four young women work to rebuild their lives in the turbulent decades that follow, they realize that their unplanned pregnancies--which were often decried as the worst mistake the girls could've ever made--were the events that led all of them to becoming the remarkable women they are. VERDICT While Hogan's novel has a thoughtful and engaging story line, the prose is stilted and choppy, and the voice is often inconsistent. The novel doesn't handle the passage of time well, as it's much too short to adequately cover 25 years of the characters' lives, especially in the time period in which it's set.--Elisabeth Clark, West Florida P.L., Pensacola

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