SUNLIGHT FINDS YOU

A 1950s teen pregnancy upends several families as characters experience different kinds of trauma.

Moriarty has an unusual gift for voice, a spark that can turn a novel about ordinary events into something compelling. In her new book, the first-person narrator is Nora Chesnow, a cheerful, bookish teenage girl living in St. Petersburg, Florida; her family has left Missouri after her mother’s death and her father’s remarriage. She sets her cap for a quiet, handsome swim-team member, Leonard Lifton. Smitten with each other, they take a risk that angers his parents. This leads to his enlisting in the Army and meeting her for a tryst before leaving to fight in the Korean War. Nora’s pregnancy and exile to a New Jersey home for unwed mothers are hardly the end of her story. In her shame and heartbreak after giving up her baby for adoption, she agrees to marry Russ Crandle, another high school classmate who has big plans as a flooring contractor. Her attempts to succeed as a 1950s housewife fall as flat as her cropped hair, which she attacks with scissors after an ill-timed telephone call clues her in to the lies the social worker told all the young women in the home. Moriarty spends many pages on Nora’s months in the home to show readers how those dismal circumstances sent Nora into a major and then perhaps chronic depression that keeps contentment just out of reach. Even after she makes a big change, she aches for the little girl she lost to the practice of closed adoption. Eventually, Nora and her family will open their hearts to each other, even allowing new members into their circle. Although this isn’t an overtly political book, it emphasizes that reproductive rights aren’t limited to termination, and that secrets, when told, can lead to family healing.

A rich, rewarding slice of history that should remind us how important it is for women to have choices of all kinds.