I was completely captivated by Wayward Girls (publication day July 15, 2025) by Susan Wiggs! It’s an epic story of friendship and survival despite the horrific conditions some girls in the United States were subjected to as recently as 50 or 60 years ago.
As the book opens in 2020, we know that a fifty-year old woman cannot get a passport because there are no records of her pre-adoption birth certificate in 1969.
The book then goes back to 1968, in Buffalo, and follows Mairin, a 15-year old Irish Catholic girl who lives with her older brother Liam, mother, and stepfather. Her beloved father died five years before in an accident on the Niagara River when he was participating in a boating rescue. Mairin works picking fruit in the summer and is worried about her best friend, Fiona, who is not feeling well, but she’s excited to possibly be able to go on her first date, to a movie, with Kevin Doyle.
But it turns out that Fiona is pregnant, Liam is drafted, and her stepfather Colm is super-creepy, barging in on her while she’s changing. Before she realizes what is happening, her mother and stepfather take her to the Sisters of the Good Shepherd girls home, where she is left because her mother is adamant that she will be safe there. It’s a Magdalene laundry, and the girls spend all day washing linens for hotels and hospitals, are not allowed to talk unless spoken to, and they are regularly subjected to the cruelties of the nuns who oversee them.
The girls are there for various reasons–some are sent there instead of juvie; some are orphaned and have nowhere else to go; and, some are pregnant. Mairin makes friends with Angela, a girl whose grandmother sent her there because she was caught with another girl, and the nuns were supposed to take care of her “problem”. Instead, the school doctor rapes her and gets her pregnant.
Mairin tries to escape over and over and rebels in every way that she can. She is sent to the “closet” and the basement as punishment, over and over as well. But a group of the girls become real friends through the trauma, until they hatch a daring escape using the best vehicle!
The book then follows Mairin’s life after the escape, when she hides out at a hippie commune, a few years later when she reunites with her mother and brother, and how she is able to build a life with someone she loves, even though she never finished school and the trauma of her time at the laundry stays with her.
The best part of the book is the last part, taking place in the present day. I don’t want to give too much away, but it is hugely satisfying and I cried a lot! Wayward Girls is going to be one of my favorite books of the year, I’m certain, despite the difficult subjects. It’s really about survival and the power of women’s friendships.
I didn’t flag anything as anti-fat, though there might be a description or two of someone as “big” without a negative association.
Reading While Fat 
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