Necessary Lies

Summary (from the publisher): Bestselling author Diane Chamberlain delivers a breakout book about a small southern town fifty years ago, and the darkest—and most hopeful—places in the human heart

After losing her parents, fifteen-year-old Ivy Hart is left to care for her grandmother, older sister and nephew as tenants on a small tobacco farm.  As she struggles with her grandmother’s aging, her sister’s mental illness and her own epilepsy, she realizes they might need more than she can give.

When Jane Forrester takes a position as Grace County’s newest social worker, she doesn’t realize just how much her help is needed.  She quickly becomes emotionally invested in her clients' lives, causing tension with her boss and her new husband.  But as Jane is drawn in by the Hart women, she begins to discover the secrets of the small farm—secrets much darker than she would have guessed.  Soon, she must decide whether to take drastic action to help them, or risk losing the battle against everything she believes is wrong.

Set in rural Grace County, North Carolina in a time of state-mandated sterilizations and racial tension, Necessary Lies tells the story of these two young women, seemingly worlds apart, but both haunted by tragedy.  Jane and Ivy are thrown together and must ask themselves: how can you know what you believe is right, when everyone is telling you it’s wrong?

Review: I won an Advance Readers' Edition of this book as a giveaway on Goodreads.

Set in a fictional rural county of North Carolina in 1960, Necessary Lies tells the story of Ivy Hart and Jane Forrester. Ivy is a young 15 year old girl who lives in a tiny house and works as a farmhand to help support her family, which consists of her diabetic grandmother, mentally challenged sister Mary Ella, and two year old nephew, Baby William. Jane comes from a more affluent family and is brought into Ivy's live when she is assigned to the Hart family as a social worker. Part of Jane's responsibility is to follow through with the petition already created to have Ivy sterilized. Her sister Mary Ella was unknowingly sterilized after the birth of her son, on grounds that she is mentally challenged and on welfare, and the state deemed it appropriate to prevent her ability to produce more children that the state would then also have to support. The situation comes to a head as Jane is accused of becoming too emotionally attached to her clients and Ivy learns the truth about what her future may look like should she be forcibly sterilized.

I was thrown off by this book because of the first person narration at first, but I gradually became deeply immersed in Ivy and Jane's story of injustice and prejudice against others based on poverty and race. "If Ivy were my neighbor, though, no one would think of sterilizing her. That was the thing. The petition was because she was poor. Poor and on welfare and unable to speak for herself" (176). Although this is a fictional story, it is based on historical events, and discusses the issue of the Eugenics Sterilization Program that allowed the state of North Carolina to sterilize over seven thousand citizens from 1929 until 1975.  

Chamberlain does an excellent job of placing the story and the social injustice in its historical context. In other words, its easy for 21st century readers to recognize the social injustice of forced sterilization and be outraged by it. Yet at the time, in 1960, it was seen as a kindness to the poor and mentally disabled who would be burdened by unwanted children. For example, Jane is told by her supervisor, Charlotte, "It can be abusive. So always ask yourself if you have the client's best interest at heart" (66). Many at the time honestly believed they were doing the best thing possible for those they served, although today we recognize it to be a crime against them. The author does a great job of portraying the issue as it would have been viewed by the majority at the time. 

Additionally, Chamberlain could easily have made Jane, the social worker, the villain of the story, who is setting out to disrupt the lives of her clients. Yet Jane is compassionate and despite her co-workers seemingly reasonable arguments for why she should fight for sterilization procedures, she knows it to be dishonest and against her own beliefs. "I squired with discomfort at the way we were intruding into their lives. It was demeaning. I tried to imagine what it would be like to have someone like me - a total stranger - push her way into my kitchen, making judgments about how I lived and what I bought with the little money I had" (75). Although Ivy's life is undeniably difficult, Jane herself makes considerable sacrifices to help the Hart family. This includes her husband's anger and society's disapproval over the married wife of a doctor working for a living.

Although this novel does an excellent job of portraying the morally gray subject matter, I was disappointed by the conclusion, which is a bit too happy to be believable. I was glad to see the characters' lives turn out well, yet I know for the over 7,000 who were sterilized, that was not always the case, and they have yet to be compensated for the harm done to them to this day. I'm also not sure how necessary the first chapter, that foreshadows the story's conclusion and is set in 2011 is to the story. I don't think it was tied to the main storyline possibly as well as it could have been, although tying in Brenna in the 2011 plotline, the young daughter of Jane's friend Lois was a nice detail.

Stars: 4