Sally Hepworth never disappoints and Darling Girls doesn't either. A quick, exciting page-turner with a strongly developed plot and nuanced characters, this novel would make a great beach read.
Three foster sisters forge a strong bond as adolescents while under the care of a hateful woman. They learn that the house where they lived with Miss Fairchild twenty-five years prior, named Wild Meadows, has been demolished and human remains have been found. Summoned by police for questioning, Jessica, Norah, and Alicia are plummeted back into their past and the experiences that left a mark on them forever; this while the mystery of the bones under Wild Meadows hangs over their heads.
Going back and forth in time, Miss Fairchild is revealed to be the worst kind of narcissist. Putting up a front for the small Australian community where they live, the woman presents Wild Meadows as an idyllic place to live. But under the surface, Miss Fairchild is an expert at manipulation and punishment. Jessica explains to Norah on her first night at Miss Fairchild's that telling her what you were afraid of (in Norah's case, the dark) was a mistake because "one day it will come back to bite you". This is foreshadowing; Miss Fairchild has ways of hurting the girls that don't show up on the skin.
Jessica learns as a foster child that when people tell her she is "lucky" to have been taken in, it really implies that her good fortune hadn't been earned and that she couldn't question it or take it for granted. She was supposed to be grateful. And the three sisters know that if they report Miss Fairchild to the authorities, they would likely be split up. However, it all comes to a head when the girls witness Miss Fairchild hurting a two-year-old she had taken in. They decide that they need to do the right thing and bravely seek help on behalf of the toddler girl they've grown to love and protect.
At one point Norah muses that it seems Miss Fairchild WANTED to take in traumatized kids. Interspersed with sessions spent with a psychiatrist, Dr. Warren, readers learn of Miss Fairchild's unhappy history and what may explain how she came to be the way she is. She talks about her own mom to Dr. Warren saying, "it was her job to protect me from monsters (re. her stepdad). He was just the monster, doing what monsters did." One wonders if that's where Miss Fairchild learned it.
In the acknowledgments, Sally Hepworth reflects on the many women she interviewed that grew up in the foster care system in Australia. She comments that for every villain in the system, there are a hundred heroes working tirelessly to help these kids. This is illustrated through Alicia's character, who as an adult works as a social worker and eventually becomes one of these heroes. Hepworth breathes life into her characters, illustrating the sense of disorientation and abandonment that result in being taken out of the home you know and placed with strangers.
This twisty mystery is classic Sally Hepworth and not to be missed! The only distraction for this reader was the inordinate number of typos in the book. Perhaps St. Martin's Press is cutting corners in their editing department, but it was all I could do to not take a red pen to the pages (I didn't). That being said, Darling Girls like Hepworth's wonderful The Soulmate, is a fantastically readable psychological thriller! I give it five stars out of five.
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