Review: The Girls with No Names

The Girls with No Names by Serena Burdick
My rating: 3.5 of 5 stars

Set in New York City around 1910, The Girls with No Names gives us a fictional account that loosely borders on the infamous "House of Mercy," an institution to which "problem" girls and women were committed by their families. Around the time of the novel, many young women in the institution had been accused of prostitution and ordered to the facility by the Bureau of Social Hygiene. Prostitution was rather loosely defined, it seems. Behavior deemed by men as flouting their standards was enough to brand a woman.

The novel follows the lives of four women- sisters Effie and Luella, their mother Jeanne, and Mabel, a young woman Effie meets in the House of Mercy when she gets herself committed there in an ill-fated attempt to find her missing sister. Mabel's story is a particularly harrowing one (a post-partum issue there goes underexplained). Against this backdrop of silencing women, we also have a cameo appearance by real-life women's rights figure Inez Milholland, a suffragist and labor lawyer.

While a novel exploring an unquestionably important issue in the early women's rights era, I was less satisfied with the novel's pacing, its predictability, and the missed opportunity to explore some of the issues facing these "fallen girls" in greater depth. That said, it's still a good introduction to the struggles of women in this period in American History, in terms of historical fiction.

I received a Digital Review Copy from the publisher in exchange for an honest review.

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