Review: The Story of Beautiful Girl by Rachel Simon

This has been on my TBR for absolutely AGES so I figured it was time to buckle down and read it. 

The book follows a few different characters over a span of many years, from the start in 1968 to the finish in 2011. The main character is Lynnie. Lynnie is a young woman who shows up one night on the doorstep of Martha, with a deaf, black man and a newborn baby in tow. Martha is a bit flummoxed but decides to take in the small family and figure everything out later. However, before they can settle down to anything the authorities come looking for Lynnie and her companion. Martha figures out that they have escaped a mental institution, ostensibly labelled a school for the incurable and feebleminded. Having hid the baby in the attic Lynnie is forced to return to the school while her companion flees into the woods and Martha pledges to protect the baby. From here we follow how everyone does in life and how everything leads back to that one night on Martha’s doorstep. 

We follow Lynnie at the school as things slowly get better, we follow Martha as she tries to keep the baby hidden from the authorities and we follow Homan, Lynnie’s companion, as he tries to find his way back to her in a world that is not geared to understand or help him in any way. 

The underlying theme of the story is how people with disabilities have been treated through the ages. From the 1960s when they were locked away in horrifying institutions where abuse was rampant to group homes and individual apartments. We also see how the world of the 1960s was unequipped (or uninterested) in dealing with a black child gone deaf. Homan got no formal education in Sign Language, rather picking signs up from some friends, and rather than teaching him or trying to understand him he was deemed “feebleminded” and locked away in an institution. Being black and poor in the 1960s, he also didn’t get any “normal” education and did not know how to read and write, which led to a number of problems for him once he escaped from the school into a world that was not equipped to deal with him. 

I thought the book was an interesting look into how things have changed in the social institution world (don’t really know what it’s called officially..), but I do wish we could have gotten to know the characters a bit more. Covering such a large expanse of time was necessary to see the development of things, but it did mean the characters evolved without us seeing it, so sometimes it was a little difficult to keep up. 

I gave this book 3 stars out of 5.