Wayward Girls: A Novel

Having read and loved other works by Susan Wings, I was excited to read Wayward Girls, especially because it focuses on young women during the Vietnam era who are sent away for various reasons. It was disheartening to discover the unevenness of this novel.

The first 200 pages, set in 1968, tell the compelling story of Mairin O’Hara, whose mother sends her to live with the Catholic Sisters of the Good Shepherd at a home for wayward girls. Mairin’s only sin is that she is beautiful, and her stepfather has taken too much of an interest in her. At the home, she meets young women who are pregnant through uneducated dalliances with boyfriends and girls who have been raped as well as girls whose poverty stricken families simply couldn’t support them. The home is dangerous, the women who run it are cruel, and the wayward girls aren’t safe.

There is a sudden time shift that covers eight years in the next sixty pages, and the final 100 pages of the novel jump ahead 50 years. It is a whiplash pace that doesn’t do justice to Mairin or the other characters, and it’s a real disappointment. While the premise and some of the writing in Wayward Girls are excellent, I wish Wiggs had made this a two- or three-book series to develop all the threads she created, which simply get lost.