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.

It’s well known that back in the day, unwed mothers had little choice about what was going to happen to them. Before the late 1980s, women who became pregnant and weren’t married were treated as outcasts. The men were not penalized in any way. In fact, quite often their virility was celebrated while women were shunted off to secret places to give birth and surrender their child. Michelle Vernal’s series The Irish Adoption House takes a look at one of these places, a fictional Roman Catholic home for unwed mothers run by the nuns in Ireland.

The second book in the series, Secrets at the Irish Adoption House, follows the story of Cecelia. In the first book, The Irish Adoption House, she was a peripheral character to the story that took place in that book. This book tells her story. In some ways, it was very similar to Maudie’s story in the first book, while at the same time coming from a very different place.

Cecelia grew up with the proverbial silver spoon in her mouth. However, the illusion of wealth is not the same as actual wealth. Her father is an Irish Lord married to a British woman, and, unfortunately, not very good at managing the family estate. Her mother is a very cold woman who expects Cecelia to do her part for the family by making a good marriage to a wealthy man and boosting the family fortunes. Cecelia doesn’t really want to do this, and falls in love with her father’s horse trainer, Finian. Finian is also part of the IRA that wants to liberate Ireland from British rule. He manages to convince Cecelia to help them out by spying on her Uncle, who is part of the military, while in London to make her debut.

Before Cecelia finds herself a wealthy husband, she learns she is pregnant with Finian’s baby. Knowing that she has committed treason for him, she believes that Finian will come for her. With the help of one of the maids, Cecelia escapes back to Ireland and hides out at the St. Patrick’s Mother and Baby Home under a different name, waiting to give birth or for Finian to come get her.

Cecelia is a young woman who craves love and acceptance. She falls for Finian because he fills that need and gives her a sense of purpose to fight for Irish independence, as well as getting back at her family for all of the pain they’ve caused her. She has to grow up fast, and her time at St. Patrick’s allows her to reflect on the mistakes she’s made. In time, she opens up to the other women at the home and bonds with Maudie, which will be important down the road. What she’s most afraid of is her family finding out where she is and losing the daughter she eventually gives birth to.

St Patrick’s is a cruel place. One of the nuns is a sadist who steals from the girls who come there and tortures them under the guise of paying for their sins. The Mother Superior looks the other way for the most part. Only one of the nuns is sympathetic to the girls here, and in this book, we learn that she once had a baby out of wedlock. None of the girls we meet in the story want to give up their child, but they don’t have the resources to take care of a child on their own. There’s no guarantee, if they leave, that their baby will be adopted, either. Cecelia and Maudie, however, desperately want to keep their babies.

The characters are well crafted and believable. Cecelia doesn’t have the street smarts to suspect Finian of anything but being honest with her, and she falls for his lines. By the time she realizes how he manipulated her, it’s too late to fix things. I felt that the story for Cecelia ended a bit too happily, as women who were in these homes were usually so traumatized by what happened to them that they could not put it behind them. What woman could forget that she gave birth to a child? But that was what was expected of them; to abandon the baby to the home with no knowledge of what would happen to that baby. Cecelia is a strong person who gets it wrong again and again. Even opening up to the other girls in her part of the home seems to haunt her. I’m curious if future books might tell us more about one of these actions by another girl, which seems like a huge betrayal.

I’m not a fan of adoption as a plot point, being adopted myself. However, I think Secrets at the Irish Adoption House does a great job pulling back the curtain on what it was like for the women and girls who were forced to live at a place like this back in this time period. When people in today’s society see surrendering a child to adoption as a viable option, they don’t understand then mental toll something like that takes on a person. Books like this help show that, even if it’s in a fictional setting.

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