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Chosen Sisters

Author: Sally Hepworth

Some families are biological. Some families are found. Some are created by trauma. The latter is true for Jessica, Norah, and Alicia. Each of them underwent a horrific experience at Wild Meadows where their unpredictable foster mother, Miss Fairchild, oscillated between cloying dependence and ruthless revenge. When Miss Fairchild directed her vitriol towards a new toddler, the girls decided to risk losing each other and report her. They thought it ended there. They were taken from Wild Meadows, raised separately, yet somehow able to keep their connections with one another. They presumed the toddler had been rescued, had gone back into the system like they did.

A decade later, they’re grown women, living in the aftermath of their choices, still close to one another. New construction in the area has unearthed a child’s body under the foundations of Miss Fairchild’s foster home, and the police want to talk to the girls again. Forced to return, they each cope with the residual horror and a great amount of guilt. Did their actions that long ago day cause Miss Fairchild to finally go all the way with her punishments? Is the dead girl in the foundation the beloved baby they banded together to raise and protect, or someone else? Do the police suspect the charming Miss Fairchild, or the three sisters, each of whom have shaky pasts and no alibies?

The write-up makes the skeleton the mystery, but the true pull of the story is the relationships among the girls and the residual effects of their gruesome childhood experiences. Some of the trauma is obvious: Norah still acts out, literarily punching and kicking her way through life. She has a record and is on the hook for jail time, after all. But the effects for the other two are more hidden, more secret.

Jessica is ostensibly successful. She has a loving husband and a great business, but the perfection of it all hides a darker coping mechanism, one that’s about to be revealed to the world. Alicia has gone on to work in the field of childcare. She’s a social worker who works specifically with traumatized children, but she will never foster, and the effects of Miss Fairchild’s treatment have kept Alicia lonely, afraid to commit, afraid to open her heart to anyone other than her adoptive sisters.

Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay

The girls’ secrets, their layered memories, their interactions and ability to forgive and support one another are what makes Darling Girls so strong. The skeleton is almost a red herring, the conclusion a sensational dash of two unnecessary twists. The story shouldn’t have been a thriller or mystery. It should have stayed as a character study, an exploration of childhood trauma and healing. That’s what drew me in and kept me turning the pages, and in the end, that’s why the tacked-on thriller-esque conclusion felt so false, so disrespectful to the thoughtfulness and compassion that went before it. This should never have been Miss Fairchilds’s story or villain twist, but the girl’s gradual redemption of themselves and their lives.

Still, you can’t have everything. Not even in fiction. Darling Girls was an enjoyable read, and each of the women made me think. While the story does have some difficult and upsetting content, it never gets gory, and it does point out (although it does not fully address) abuses in the foster system.

– Frances Carden

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Frances Carden
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