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The Girls We Sent Away

The Girls We Sent Away

Historical FictionLiterary Fiction
Pages
352
Published
2024
Language
English

Synopsis

Lorraine Delford has always kept her eyes on the sky. It is the 1960s, the Space Race is accelerating, and Lorraine dreams of becoming the first woman astronaut—of doing something that matters beyond the roles North Carolina expects a young woman to fill. Then she becomes pregnant, and the future she imagined collapses into a single, shameful secret.

To protect the family's reputation, her parents send her away to a maternity home for "wayward girls." What is described as a refuge turns out to be something colder: a house of rigid rules and quiet cruelties, where unwed mothers are pressured—and often coerced—into surrendering their babies for adoption. Stripped of her name, her plans, and any say in what happens to her own child, Lorraine must decide whether she has the power to fight the very society she once longed to impress, or whether she will be ground down by it.

Set during the Baby Scoop Era, The Girls We Sent Away sets the soaring promise of the Race to Space against the earthbound realities that kept women in their place. It is a moving, quietly furious novel about autonomy, belonging, and the search for agency when everything you believed about your life falls away.

Prose complexity
7/10

Vibe

EmotionalSadHopefulReflectiveThought-Provoking
Coming of AgeSurvivalBetrayal

Genres

Historical Fiction Literary Fiction Women's Fiction

About the author

M
Meagan Church

Meagan Church is the New York Times and USA Today bestselling author of emotionally-charged, thought-provoking fiction that explores the domestic lives, bodies, and thwarted ambitions of twentieth-century American women. Her novels include The Last Carolina Girl (2023), set in 1935 against the backdrop of North Carolina's newly formed eugenics board; The Girls We Sent Away (2024), which follows a college-bound girl sent to a home for unwed mothers during the 1960s Baby Scoop Era, and which was a...

Characters

Lorraine DelfordProtagonist
All characters in The Girls We Sent Away

Frequently asked questions

  • Is The Girls We Sent Away based on a true story?

    Lorraine and her story are fiction, but the world around her is real. The novel is set during the Baby Scoop Era (roughly the mid-1940s through early 1970s), when hundreds of thousands of unmarried pregnant women in the United States were sent to maternity homes and pressured into surrendering their babies for adoption. Meagan Church draws on that documented history to tell one invented girl's story.

  • Is The Girls We Sent Away part of a series?

    No. It is a standalone historical novel, Meagan Church's second book after The Last Carolina Girl (2023). You do not need to read her other novels first—each stands entirely on its own.

  • Why does the novel keep returning to the Space Race?

    Lorraine dreams of becoming the first woman astronaut, and the book deliberately sets the 1960s Race to Space—an era of soaring ambition and open sky—against the earthbound limits placed on women. The technology of the age could reach the moon, yet a pregnant, unmarried girl had almost no control over her own body and future. That contrast is the emotional engine of the story.

  • What content warnings does The Girls We Sent Away carry?

    The novel centers on reproductive coercion and the emotional abuse of unwed mothers within a maternity home, including pressure to surrender a baby for adoption. Readers sensitive to themes of pregnancy, loss of bodily autonomy, and institutional cruelty should be aware going in.

  • Who will enjoy The Girls We Sent Away?

    It's a natural fit for readers of emotionally-charged, women-centered historical fiction and for book clubs—much like Meagan Church's own The Last Carolina Girl. Anyone drawn to stories that recover hidden chapters of twentieth-century women's history, with a resilient young heroine at the center, will find a great deal to sit with here.