Keeping Lucy by T. Greenwood

Dover, Massachusetts, 1969. Ginny Richardson's heart was torn open when her baby girl, Lucy, born with Down Syndrome, was taken from her. Under pressure from his powerful family, her husband, Ab, sent Lucy away to Willowridge, a special school for the “feeble-minded." Ab tried to convince Ginny it was for the best. That they should grieve for their daughter as though she were dead. That they should try to move on.

But two years later, when Ginny's best friend, Marsha, shows her a series of articles exposing Willowridge as a hell-on-earth--its squalid hallways filled with neglected children--she knows she can't leave her daughter there. With Ginny's six-year-old son in tow, Ginny and Marsha drive to the school to see Lucy for themselves. What they find sets their course on a heart-racing journey across state lines—turning Ginny into a fugitive.

For the first time, Ginny must test her own strength and face the world head-on as she fights Ab and his domineering father for the right to keep Lucy. Racing from Massachusetts to the beaches of Atlantic City, through the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia to a roadside mermaid show in Florida, Keeping Lucy is a searing portrait of just how far a mother’s love can take her.

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About The Author

T. Greenwood is the author of twelve novels. She has received grants from the Sherwood Anderson Foundation, the Christopher Isherwood Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and, most recently, the Maryland State Arts Council. She has won four San Diego Book Awards. Five of her novels have been BookSense76/IndieBound picks. BODIES OF WATER was finalist for a Lambda Foundation award. Her thirteenth novel, KEEPING LUCY, will be published in August 2019.

She teaches creative writing for San Diego Writer's Ink and online for The Writer's Center. She and her husband, Patrick, live in San Diego, CA with their two daughters. She is also a photographer.

More information on T. Greenwood can be found at her websites: http://www.tgreenwood.com and
http://www.ephemerafiles.com  


My Review

A look at a mother’s pain of losing a child, but her child is not dead, just taken from her, and we are on a journey to find her.
There is a reason all of those homes have closed, a place for unwanted children, but as you read this book, you may want the tissues handy, you quickly realize that this is something that you are not going to get over. This is a mother that two years later still has empty arms, and yes, she has a little boy to raise, but when you learn what happened to the lost child you are going to cringe.
This book quickly became a page turner, and the story just kept getting better and better, but the possibility of jail is always in the back of your mind.
What will be the solution here, and will Lucy have to go back to that horrible place? There are answers here, but there are also so surprises, a little boy that finds a sister, and a mother who has her arms filled, but will this last, or will big brother have its way?
Once the last page is turned here it will not go away, this one lingers.

I received this book through Net Galley and the Publisher St. Martin’s Press, and was not required to give a positive review.