The Forgotten Home Child

by Genevieve Graham

[Stephanie]

This review was originally posted on Once Upon a ChapterI received this book for free from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review. This does not affect my opinion of the book or the content of my review.





This was it. This was the one. The Forgotten Home Child by Genevieve Graham is what landed her on my auto-buy list of authors. (Just to be clear there's only one other author so far that I will buy whatever they decide to put out. Most of my other pre-orders are series continuations or buzz from other bloggers.) Graham had me spellbound. I stayed up pretty late for me on a workweek night to get as far as I could. The next day I stayed up until 2 am to finish it. I had to know what happened.

While the way Graham decided to tell us Winny's story isn't necessarily new, it is captivating. Of course Graham had her unique way of doing so. We get snippets of the present with the majority of the book being written in Winny's past. It is some past. Then we have chapters that alternate between Winny and Jack. Graham won points because she taught me something new about fairly recent history. I was completely floored. I really want to go into detail about it but it might be a pretty big spoiler and I hate spoilers.

The Forgotten Home Child made me feel all of the emotions. All. Of. Them. My face has never contorted in rage while reading a book. My face completely gives me away every time. I've never been so angry as I was when I read parts of this book. Face contortions happened. I teared up multiple times throughout the book. It also filled me with pride for Winny and her rag tag family. What Winny and her friends experienced was horrific and that's just the beginning of it. I'm still stunned by the way they refused to give up or be what they were told they were.

I adored the characters in this book. I really connected with Winny and therefore by default with Mary, Jack, Edward, and Cecil. It made reading much more intense. I rallied with them. I was with them when they were broken. Reading The Forgotten Home Child was such a great experience and it made me aware of a part of history that isn't talked about. It just recently received attention within the last 5 or so years. It's a part of history that has effects still today.

I really could keep going on and on about The Forgotten Home Child by Genevieve Graham. It was an amazing read and I enjoyed it so much that I pre-ordered a copy. I don't think that you need to be a fan of historical fiction to fall in love this book. I truly believe that it will resonate with all readers. It's a beautiful story that needed to be written. Now it needs to be read.