Don't get me wrong--THE FOUNDLING is a good book, just not for me. So my criticism of it should not be taken as negative so much as the reasons it isn't for me.

The setting is Pennsylvania, 1927 and 1928. Mary was raised in a Catholic orphanage. Now she is secretary for a woman she greatly admires, Dr. Vogel, who runs the Nettleston State Village for Feebleminded Women of Childbearing Age. Just from the name of that institution, you should be able to predict what this book is about. And I found the story predictable throughout.

Yes, institutions with names like that really did exist at that time. The idea was, institutionalize feebleminded women until they can no longer get pregnant, ensuring they do not produce feebleminded children to be dependent on taxpayers.

Two of the many problems with that, as Mary found: many if not most of the institutionalized women were not feebleminded, and the institution was worse than a prison. A resident of Nettleston State Village was serving a life sentence when she had done nothing wrong or had already served her prison sentence. Mary took too long to figure out what should have been obvious to her during her first week on the job. She made the book infuriating.

As with all historical fiction I read, I wondered throughout THE FOUNDLING how accurate it was, how much was based on Ann Leary's imagination and how much was based on her research. I would have liked Leary's "Author's Note" to have expanded on this more than it did.

Although Leary did not intentionally write THE FOUNDLING as a young adult novel, that is the way it came across to me. The writing style is young adult. I'm not a young adult and, with rare exceptions, don't appreciate young adult books. I would have liked this book if it had been written from an adult point of view, perhaps from Mary's journalist boyfriend.