By Christine McFaul
Content Warning: Abuse (mental, emotional, verbal, child neglect and child abuse), Death of a child, Kidnapping, Misogyny, Pregnancy (child taken after birth, miscarriage), Racism, Trauma
The Family Way, by Canadian author Laura Best, is a middle-grade historical fiction novel tackling a “dark chapter in Nova Scotia’s history.” Though technically a prequel to Best’s larger Cammie series (Flying with a Broken Wing, 2013 and Cammie Takes Flight, 2017), The Family Way has been written as a standalone story and reads well as such.
“If it wasn’t for Finny Paul, I’d have spent a lonely childhood at the old farmhouse in East Chester, just Ma and me.”
This first sentence is an excellent introduction not only to the main character, twelve-year-old Tulia May but also to the setting, which is a character unto itself in this novel. With much of rural Nova Scotia still recovering from the Depression, life for Tulia May and her widowed mother towards the end of the 1930s is not easy. Rather, it is lonely, stark, and demands a heroic amount of grit and hard work from both mother and child in order to survive
To fend off poverty, Tulia’s mother works in the laundry at the nearby Ideal Maternity Home, a place where unwed mothers go to give birth discreetly and where adoptions to rich Americans can be arranged for a fee. Tulia often accompanies her mother to help scrub the constant piles of dirty diapers, and it doesn’t take the reader long to discover that Tulia has a rebellious streak as she sneaks off to visit babies in the nursery and befriends Finny Paul (a boy she knows from school) which are both against the express wishes of her mother.
“I’m not by nature an overly curious person, but it was hard for me to mind my own business when Finny was around.”
It is both her rebellious streak and friendship with Finny that leads Tulia to finally acknowledge the sinister idiosyncrasies she would prefer to ignore at the Ideal Maternity Home. And Tulia and Finny’s further investigations yield tragic results when they learn that babies are being starved to death and disposed of—a discovery that takes on new meaning when Tulia’s older sister Becky becomes a resident of the home.
Set against the backdrop of the Depression and Canada’s entrance into WWII, the narrative does an excellent job of confronting the complicated history of adoption, infant death, pregnancy, stigma, and limited women’s rights that existed during that time period. It also includes a subplot facing the racism and bigotry of the time, and to that end, the Publisher and author include a note on language…
“The Family Way is set in a time—the 1930s—and a place—rural Nova Scotia, Canada — when hurtful words used to describe certain members of a community would have been common…”
A helpful inclusion, but in my opinion, this particular subplot could have been further strengthened by giving Finny Paul, a First Nations character, more depth and agency within the story itself.
That said, Tulia May’s voice is strong and engaging, the setting beautifully revealed and the story of the Ideal Maternity Home still relevant today. I would recommend this book for readers at the higher end of the middle-grade age range, and due to its subject matter and historical roots, I believe this book would also appeal to both YA and adult readers.
Thank you, Nimbus Publishing, for the complimentary copy in exchange for an honest review.