Worth A Read Yes
Length 400
Quick Review A librarian stumbles across a puzzling part of history in the Berachah Home, where erring girls went for a fresh start.
Home for Erring and Outcast Girls by Julie Kibler is a much better novel than I expected to encounter. There are so many ways Kibler could have gone wrong, but she didn’t. Diving into complex women’s issues and how society dealt with the women in question paralleled by a century of “change.” Based on a real house in rural Texas serving real women, Kibler builds a world full of sorrow and empathy.
In 2017, Cate is a librarian working in a Texas University Library’s archives and becomes fascinated looking through documentation of the Berachah home after stumbling upon a cemetery in 2017. She has a penchant for running and running away; she lives a solitary life aside from making a connection with one of her student workers. Dealing with a mysterious past, flashbacks to 1998 as a highschooler slowly reveal insight into her troubled past. In 1904, Lizzie Bates, Docie, and Mattie Corder are escaping the evils of a patriarchal society by finding refuge in the Berachah Home for Erring and Outcast Girls. They find solace surrounded by religion and other fallen women and their children as they are taught skills to fend for themselves.
Kibler touches on everything from drugs to rape to incest to abuse and more in this raw historical fiction about loss and friendship. Home for Erring and Outcast Girls drives home the fact that women take a backseat to men, always. Their plans. Their dreams. Their reputations. Their futures. This has been a truth for the majority of societies for as long as history can document. As much as things are changing, much remains the same. Including Cate, as a contemporary woman, shows the parallel between the two eras and how little has changed for women. How little choice there is.
The Berachah Home really did exist outside of Arlington, Texas and was founded by James and Maggie Upchurch. They had a revolutionary idea to keep the children with their mothers. At the time, mother’s were separated from their children without a choice, more often than not, when the children were born out of wedlock. There are real excerpt from The Purity Journal, which went out to graduates of the home and donors.
Abuse is a central point in Home for Erring and Outcast Girls. Kibler makes a beautiful statement I and many other survivors of abuse, loss, abandonment, addiction, rape, assault, and more have felt: “Or how I maybe didn’t fight hard enough, or say no the right way, or at the right times.” Guilt and shame are a raw undercurrent in this book about being helpless and reclaiming an identity in the after. Everyone survives their own hell, but so many of the emotions and recovery processes are the similar.
Religion is a character in its own right in this novel. It plays a role of savior but also demon. Kibler is not afraid to show the church in the light of benefactor and evil doer depending on the point of view of the character. Religion is not one size fits all, and everyone has different experiences. Even in the most positive of lights, the church do not do right by women. Women are often depicted as temptresses “because churches, in general, are still bastions of judgement masquerading as refugees of grace and acceptance.”
I was utterly surprised at how much I enjoyed this book. I wasn’t sure what to expect, but Julie Kibler captured my interest and respect with her cutting and insightful novel Home for Erring and Outcast Girls.
Memorable Quotes
“A room filled with people can be lonelier than solitude.”
“Her ma had done what she must to survive, and that was how it was for women.”
“It was always the man who took what he wanted, and the woman who lost everything.”
“Devastation was a pain you thought would never go away, and sometimes it didn’t.”
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Title: Home for Erring and Outcast Girls
Author: Julie Kibler
Publisher: Crown
Copyright: 2019
ISBN: 9780451499332
