Kirkus
Copyright © Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

White sisters in 1950s Mississippi lose their mother to a botched abortion and spend the next several decades struggling to navigate their own fraught relationship.Grace and June McAlister live in Opelika, Mississippi, where their father is an accountant for the lumber mill and their mother stays home to look after the family. The girls don't know that their mother, Olivia, always wanted to be more than a wife and mother. When Olivia discovers she's pregnant again, she visits a local abortionist whose shoddy technique causes her irreparable physical damage. After Olivia confesses to her husband, Holly, what she's done, he takes the girls to see the giraffes at the nearby zoo. During the time they spend looking at animals, Olivia bleeds out and dies at home. As Holly grieves his wife, he becomes obsessed with protecting his daughters. Instead of tending to their meals or hygiene, though, he spends all his time in the backyard, digging a bomb shelter. After a few years of Holly's subpar supervision, Grace ends up a pregnant teenager. When her sister, June, discovers the pregnancy, she immediately tells Holly, and he sends Grace to a home for pregnant girls where she can wait out the pregnancy and put the baby up for adoption. Grace blames June for several unfortunate events that follow, and their strife continues for decades thereafter. Every time the sisters attempt to move beyond the mistakes of their shared past, something new seems to get in their way. An important story about women's reproductive rights and the consequences of limited choices, the novel will transport readers to the rural Mississippi of a bygone era. The prose is teeming with beautifully vivid portraits of local birds and vegetation as well as evocative descriptions of contemporary foods, homemade liquor, and weekday dinners. Told from the perspectives of multiple characters, including the sisters, their parents, and Ed Mae Johnson, an African American nurse from the orphanage, the story offers unique and insightful perspectives on family, race, forgiveness, and personal agency.An artfully crafted tale that explores how restrictions on women's choices impacted female relationships in mid-20th-century America. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Publishers Weekly
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Evocatively depicting the small town of Opelika, Miss., in 1957, Gwin (Promise) tells the heart-rending story of a mother feeling trapped in her life, whose death throws her family into turmoil. Olivia goes to a "chiropractor" for an illegal abortion, dying a few days later from complications. Her husband, Holly, copes by trying to protect his daughters from the unlikely threats of bombs and natural disasters while ignoring their emotional needs. The older daughter, Grace, blames herself for not finding Olivia sooner, and her own poor choices lead to her becoming pregnant at 16 and getting sent away to have the baby in secret. The younger daughter, June, grows up to marry unhappily. Meanwhile, Ed Mae, the orphanage worker who cares for Grace's child, has a moment of distraction that leads to complex consequences. Though the story is wrought with sadness, there's a sense of hope that those thrown off course may find happiness in the end. Fans of tear-jerkers will forgive the occasional too-pat coincidence as Gwin brings all the threads together for an uplifting finale. This is a satisfying fable of errors and consequences in a tumultuous era. Agent: Jane von Mehren, Aevitas Creative Mgmt. (Aug.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

Book list
From Booklist, Copyright © American Library Association. Used with permission.

One Friday morning, Olivia McAlister took the money her husband had secretly been saving for a trip to Paris and made a journey instead to a filthy house in the country for an abortion. She had traveled far from her hometown of New Orleans, and her WWII job running the main office at a boatyard, to small-town Opelika, Mississippi but she would travel no farther. Olivia's tragic story creates a chasm in the lives of her husband and their two girls, 10-year-old June and 12-year-old Grace. While her husband mourns the son he never had and becomes obsessed with keeping his family safe by building a bomb shelter, June and Grace must learn to care for themselves and navigate the stormy waters of young adulthood. Gwin skillfully switches between the varied perspectives of the family and those who impact their stories, creating a novel saturated with heartbreak but still offering thin rays of hope. As their fragile attempts to rebuild their lives are challenged, June and Grace see their chances at redemption hanging in the balance.--Bridget Thoreson Copyright 2019 Booklist