Take My Hand by Dolen Perkins-ValdezMy rating: 4 of 5 stars
This historical novel is based, inspired by real life events. It’s shocking to find there were some programs set up to sterilize women deemed unfit. Who are defined as unfit for motherhood? Most often it is the poor, people of color, disabled that are targeted. Stories like this help to highlight travesties of the past, to humanize what happened, and help to ensure these flawed decisions and actions are not repeated.
The setting is Birmingham, Alabama, with the frame of the story told by Civil Townsend, to her twenty-something adopted daughter, about her life when she was around the same age. Looking back to the early 1970s, when Townsend started her first job as a nurse at a family planning clinic. Civil’s first assigned home visit takes place in the country to give birth control shots to two sisters. What she finds transforms Civil’s life trajectory.
The two sisters are young, not of age, and one is mute. They live in abject poverty and don’t go to school. Civil feels her duty to help this family and get them into government housing, so the father, grandmother and girls no long have to live in a one-room shack with an outdoor toilet. Civil becomes embedded with this family, quickly questioning why they need birth control at such a young age, before the younger has even started her periods. Then one day the girls are sterilized, the father and grandmother being illiterate, hardly knew what they signed for. Civil, along with the family, file suit against the clinic where she works. It turns bigger than this case and their lawyer sues on behalf of the hundreds of other women found in a similar situation.
The story is heartbreaking, yet wonderfully told. There are moments when the past is broken with the present, speaking to Civil’s daughter, and a few times it felt awkward, but it comes together at the end.
Thanks to Berkley Publishing Group and NetGalley for an uncorrected electronic advance review copy of this book.
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