The Girl In The Letter by Emily Gunnis

 

Available on Amazon

Rating (1-5) - 📘📘📘📘📘
Genre - Historical Thriller, Historical Mystery
Format - Paperback
Length - 384 pages


*Amazon Blurb*

In the winter of 1956 pregnant young Ivy is sent in disgrace to St Margaret's, a home for unmarried mothers in the south of England, run by nuns, to have her child. Her baby daughter is adopted. Ivy will never leave. Sixty years later, journalist Samantha stumbles upon a series of letters from Ivy to her lover, pleading with him to rescue her from St Margaret's before it is too late. As Sam pieces together Ivy's tragic story, terrible secrets about St Margaret's dark past begin to emerge. What happened to Ivy, to her baby, and to the hundreds of children born in the home? What links a number of mysterious, sudden deaths in the area? And why are those who once worked at St Margaret's so keen that the truth should never be told? As Sam unpicks the sinister web of lies surrounding St Margaret's, she also looks deep within - to confront some unwelcome truths of her own...

*My Review* 

 

This book reminded me a lot of one of my favorites, What She Left Behind by Ellen Marie Wiseman. Although the book is fiction, it's hard to to think about how many people it really did happen to especially "back in the day" when mental illnesses weren't understood as well as today.

 

The book goes back and forth between Sam (a reporter) and Ivy, present day and the past. Sam's grandmother comes across some letters that she finds herself unable to just read and put down. She becomes almost obsessed with find out who the girl in the letter is. 

 

Ivy is a young girl in love, but she's in love with the wrong guy. She finds herself pregnant and refuses to abort the baby. Once the baby is born she is forced to give it up. I can't imagine anyone being kept in an asylum with people that truly are crazy when they are perfectly sane.

As you read Sam's story you want to know what happened to the people and St. Margaret's. While ready Ivy's, you'll be shocked at what she went thru and how she "escaped".