Equipped with a startling ability to draw graceful fiction from grotesque history, Dolen Perkins-Valdez (Wench; Balm) brings her talents to the 1970s in Take My Hand, a novel probing the fallout of stolen autonomy and misogynoir. In the first chapter, narrator Civil Townsend admits: "I'm not trying to change the past. I'm telling it in order to lay these ghosts to rest." The ghosts this young nurse in Montgomery, Ala., unearths are malicious. Assigned to administer birth control to two Black girls living in extreme poverty, Civil soon discovers that the girls have been sterilized involuntarily and that they are but two within a larger network of Black women who have been subjected to the crime. Civil, hellbent on finding the truth and ensuring it is dragged into the open, fights to learn the full extent of what has happened to the women of her community--and how much she may have been complicit.
Perkins-Valdez ushers in this central conflict slowly and methodically; when it arrives, the revelations that follow are unforgettable. As she writes in her author's note, "My hope is that this novel will provoke discussions about culpability in a society that still deems poor, Black, and disabled as categories unfit for motherhood." Readers will find it impossible to take in even a chapter without their gut twisting in recognition; the ghosts of these horrors are still alive today. Take My Hand solidifies how essential it is that their stories continue to be told. --Lauren Puckett, freelance writer