Note: Thank you to NetGalley, Bookouture, and authorMichelle Vernal for the advanced reader copy of this book. This review will also be posted on NetGalley. What follows is my unbiased review of the book.

When it comes to adoption in fiction, I have mixed feelings. Having been adopted myself, I hate thinking of my life being a plot point. When it’s done right, however, it can shed light on the very real complexities surrounding being adopted. Thankfully, The Irish Adoption House gives the topic the right amount of gravity while telling an emotional story. Keep in mind that the book is set for the most part in the early 1920s, when social values were quite different than what they are today.

Maudie O’Connor is a woman in love in her hometown of Rush, Ireland. The man she loves, Ronan, is deeply involved in the Irish Independence fight against the British. As much as he would love to wed her, he doesn’t think it would be fair to Maudie. After delivering a warning to him one day, Maudie is on her way back to the cottage she shares with her family when she is raped by one of the British occupiers. She ends up killing him, and Ronan disposes of the body. However, the occupiers have their own suspicions about what happened to one of them and burn down the farmhouse he shares with his father and brothers. Ronan then disappears.

Maudie soon learns she is with child, but she isn’t sure whether it is Ronan’s or her rapists. Even though Maudie’s mother knows her daughter was raped, they still see the pregnancy as a moral judgment. Working with their parish priest, they force Maudie to leave home and go to the St. Patrick’s Home for Mothers and Babies. There she is warehoused with other “fallen women” and treated cruelly by the nuns who run it. Maudie has no intention of giving away her baby, convincing herself that Ronan will come for her once he can. Once she gives birth, she is only allowed to spend time with the infant while she is nursing her, which are the moments that keep her going. One day, though, she’s told there’s no need for her to go to the nursery any longer. Her baby was adopted.

I’ve been involved in adoption circles for almost thirty years now, reading stories from across the globe about what women have gone through. The Irish Adoption House is fairly accurate, even into the latter part of the 20th century in Ireland. Many of the things Maudie experiences were true across the globe. Single women were often told they would have to surrender their child. If they didn’t, they were considered mentally unstable, and the relinquishment was forced upon them anyway, along with a trip to a mental hospital. There weren’t the resources available to women that there are today. Although Maudie believes she could carve out a life for herself and her baby by reinventing herself in America, she doesn’t get that opportunity. Could she have done so? I don’t know. I know that the Great Depression was approaching, so that would have been another obstacle in her path, but Maudie didn’t know this at the time, of course.

The story is told from the perspective of Maudie traveling back to Ireland in her 80s from where she now resides in Savannah, Georgia. Why Savannah? This is where Maudie has tracked her stolen child to. What happens in Savannah feels very contrived to me as a way of giving the story a happy ending of sorts, but it works for the story overall.

I do have to say the perspectives of the people who adopted Maudie’s baby were quite unusual, and are even unusual in this day and age. Too many adoptive parents see the children they adopt as a commodity, and not as an individual who is already imprinted with certain things. The actions they take throughout the story are very remarkable. I wish more adoptive parents were like them, rather than the stories I have heard from most adoptees.

I did enjoy reading The Irish Adoption House and read through it pretty quickly. At just 294 pages, it’s not a very long read, and it does its best to give everyone a happily ever after, even though that’s not usually the case in situations like this. To understand why Maudie does what she does once she’s located her baby, you have to understand how nearly impossible it was for a single mother to raise a child by herself at the time. At that point, she’s not thinking of herself, but more about the child and how she would suffer under the stigmas of the day. I’m glad we’re past that point now.