Told from four different POV. Amazing story of four survivors who were true survivors. Four young women institutionalized for being “different”, only because their families believed it to be. How they were labeled “imbeciles” when they were truly the smartest people. I didn’t expect to be so affected by this story, rooting for them to escape. ( )

So well done, giving the reader a visceral sense of the wrong done in these deplorable institutions, it’s appropriately difficult to read at times but worth investing your heart in.

I deeply cared for these four girls (and some periphery characters as well) pretty much from the moment they were introduced. I loved London, how tough she is by necessity yet she’s all heart with a tender and protective streak running through her. Rose was just as wonderful, she has down syndrome and while there are those in the novel who underestimate her the author certainly never did, Rose is every bit as savvy as she is sweet. Maxine is Rose’s older sister and perhaps the most vulnerable of the bunch as she still holds out hope for a bright shiny future away from the institution, like Rose’s friends I spent much of the book hoping she wouldn’t be crushed by reality. Lastly there’s Alice, the book never loses sight of the fact that as a black girl she has it even worse than the others, the cost of her breaking a rule would be that much greater and so Alice tries to maintain a hard shell around herself but she also can’t help falling in love, feelings that due to the time period and circumstances are mostly kept under wraps though there are a couple scenes that are as heartwarming as these girls deserve. ( )

Dark AF. The author’s note that she used direct quotes from medical records is key, because otherwise it would seem over the top. For people who loved The War That Saved My Life and want to level up with far more upsetting realism. ( )

J. (for Jen) Albert Mann paints a heartbreaking portrait of life inside the Walter Fernald School in Waltham, Mass. nearly 100 years ago. The school was home to all the victims of the Eugenics movement, which promoted the strengthening of the human race by removing all "defectives," all children who were differently abled, from general society and placing them, for life, in institutions. Although Fernald and other institutions billed themselves as schools, very little was being taught. Instead, the residents did all the manual labor required to keep the school going, their lifetime incarceration. Residents were classified as idiots, imbeciles, and morons. This determined where they would be housed and what would be expected of them. Frequent intelligence testing went into this classification method.

The story centers around four girls: Maxine, a lesbian, her sister Rose, who had Down's Syndrome, Alice, with a club foot, and London, an orphan who becomes pregnant by the butcher's son. After she beats up Alby, the father of her baby, she is arrested and consigned to the school for life.

What begins as a grim story becomes a tale of courage and adventure, as the girls concoct a plan to change their fates.

While I liked this book a lot, and will recommend it, I felt the ending, well, one part of the ending, was unbelievable, the kind of ending that makes you think the author realized she was getting close to the limit of pages for a YA novel and had to wrap it up.

As a side note, one of my favorite walking trails, at the Beaver Brook Reservation in Waltham, passes by a small, old graveyard, that sits on land formerly belonging to the Fernald School. The old stones in this woodland setting were divided into two groups--half of them for Catholics, half for Protestants. They were the graves of some of the residents of the school, which didn't finally close until 2014. ( )

Follows the life of four young children through the terrible life of mental health in Boston Fernal School in the 1940's ( )