Review: The Last Carolina Girl

The Last Carolina Girl by Meagan Church
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

4.5 Stars

I hate to say it, but this is the first time I have heard of Eugenics and the many people it affected. Then find out that it is still happening in some legal guardianship instances. And I quote," Is forced sterilization still happening in the United States?
In states that do not have laws, forced sterilizations might still be happening to people under guardianship. This is because many guardians have a lot of power to make health care decisions for people under guardianship. They usually do not need to ask a judge before deciding what health care someone gets." Unquote.

This book is not totally about Eugenics, but it does happen, and it isn't pretty. This whole family isn't pretty. This book starts in the 1930's end the epilogue ends in the year 2006. Leah had a very difficult childhood, at least to our standards today. She lost her mother in childbirth and her father more than a decade later. Among other tragendies. Now she has nowhere to go, so a family opts to be a sort of Fostercare family...or are they really? Secrets and lies abound.

This was a difficult read with no perky happy ending. It does have a satisfying ending, although I wish the author would have delved into a deeper confrontation with the family that took her in.

I recommend this book to those who are interested in Southern history from the 1930s

*ARC supplied by the publisher Sourcebooks Landmark, the author, and NetGalley.


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SYNOPSIS: A searing book club novel for fans of Where the Crawdad's Sing and The Girls in the Stilt House following one girl fighting for her family, her body, and her right to create a future all her own

Some folks will do anything to control the wild spirit of a Carolina girl...

For fourteen-year-old Leah Payne, life in her beloved coastal Carolina town is as simple as it is free. Devoted to her lumberjack father and running through the wilds where the forest meets the shore, Leah's country life is as natural as the Loblolly pines that rise to greet the Southern sky.

When an accident takes her father's life, Leah is wrenched from her small community and cast into a family of strangers with a terrible secret. Separated from her only home, Leah is kept apart from the family and forced to act as a helpmate for the well-to-do household. When a moment of violence and prejudice thrusts Leah into the center of the state's shameful darkness, she must fight for her own future against a world that doesn't always value the wild spirit of a Carolina girl.

Set in 1935 against the very real backdrop of a recently formed state eugenics board, The Last Carolina Girl is a powerful and heart-wrenching story of fierce strength, forgotten history, autonomy, and the places and people we ultimately call home.