My rating: 4 of 5 stars
“Woman must have her freedom, the fundamental freedom of choosing whether or not she will be a mother and how many children she will have. Regardless of what man’s attitude may be, that problem is hers — and before it can be his, it is hers alone. She goes through the vale of death alone, each time a babe is born. As it is the right neither of man nor the state to coerce her into this ordeal, so it is her right to decide whether she will endure it.”
----Margaret Sanger
Mary Volmer, an American author, pens a well crafted as well as an enthralling historical fiction, Reliance, Illinois that centers around the life of a young teenage girl and her young unwed mother, who shifted from Kentucky to Reliance in order to get married to a wealthy bachelor, all the while addressing the little daughter with a birthmark covering half of her face, as the woman's little sister, grief-stricken by her mother's actions and the coldness by her mother's new family, the little girl takes shelter in the mansion of the town founder's daughter, who teach her a great deal about life women's life in the post-Civil war period, but dark secrets threaten to destroy the safe coccoon of happiness that the little girl built around her.
