Meagan Church Knihy

A searing book club novel for fans of Where the Crawdad's Sing and The Girls in the Stilt House following one girl fighting for her family, her body, and her right to create a future all her own Some folks will do anything to control the wild spirit of a Carolina girl... For fourteen-year-old Leah Payne, life in her beloved coastal Carolina town is as simple as it is free. Devoted to her lumberjack father and running through the wilds where the forest meets the shore, Leah's country life is as natural as the Loblolly pines that rise to greet the Southern sky. When an accident takes her father's life, Leah is wrenched from her small community and cast into a family of strangers with a terrible secret. Separated from her only home, Leah is kept apart from the family and forced to act as a helpmate for the well-to-do household. When a moment of violence and prejudice thrusts Leah into the center of the state's shameful darkness, she must fight for her own future against a world that doesn't always value the wild spirit of a Carolina girl. Set in 1935 against the very real backdrop of a recently formed state eugenics board, The Last Carolina Girl is a powerful and heart-wrenching story of fierce strength, forgotten history, autonomy, and the places and people we ultimately call home.

A searing book club read for fans of Ellen Marie Wiseman and The Girls with No Names set in the Baby Scoop Era of 1960s and the women of a certain condition swept up in a dark history. It's the 1960s and Lorraine Delford has it all - an upstanding family, a perfect boyfriend, and a white picket fence home in North Carolina. Yet every time she looks through her father's telescope, she dreams of the stars. It's ambitious, but Lorraine has always been exceptional. But when this darling girl-next-door gets pregnant, she's forced to learn firsthand the realities that keep women grounded. To hide their daughter's secret shame, the Delfords send Lorraine to a maternity home for wayward girls. But this is no safe haven - it's a house with dark secrets and suffocating rules. And as Lorraine begins to piece together a new vision for her life, she must decide if she can fight against the powers that aim to take her child or submit to the rules of a society she once admired. Powerful and affecting, The Girls We Sent Away is a timely novel that explores autonomy, belonging, and a quest for agency when the illusions of life-as-you-know-it fall away.

With odes of The Bell Jar comes a searing historical suspense following a 1950s housewife who, when a mysterious new wife moves across the way, begins to unearth dark secrets about her neighborhood and her own mind. In the 1950s, nothing is valued more than conformity, and Lulu Mayfield has spent the last five years molding herself into the ideal housewife. But after the birth of her daughter, Lulu's carefully constructed life begins to teeter. Exhausted by expectations and haunted by tragic memories, Lulu looks to her new neighbor, Bitsy. Bitsy, always the model of a perfect housewife, is not quite what she seems and Lulu knows something dark lurks beneath Bitsy's constant smile. Increasingly fixated on Bitsy and her perfectly crafted life, Lulu's mental state begins to fracture, and memories she had suppressed long ago begin to rise to the surface. Soon, Lulu is forced to confront the possibility that she might be headed down a path much darker than she could ever foresee. Set against the backdrop of a post-war era defined by tradition and constrained femininity, The Mad Wife weaves together a coming-of-age search for identity with a psychological drama so poignant, you won't be able to put it down.