Kindle Book: Sunlight on My Shadow

 Sunlight on my Shadow

by Judy Liautaud

Length: 312 pages

Format: Kindle book
Price: FREE from the Kindle Lending Library

Author Website: http://sunlightonmyshadow.com/?author=1

Basic Premise: In this memoir, 16-year-old Judy finds herself pregnant in the year 1967.  Her staunchly Catholic family is horrified and go to great lengths to keep the pregnancy, birth, and following adoption secret.  After decades of silence, Judy decides to tell her story, and find her baby.

My Take: 8 out of 10 (scale here)

We do a unit at school over the 1960s, and while it feels wrong to say that it's one of my favorite time periods (given all the civil unrest), it kind of is.  I love the clothes, the music, the hair, the times.  The book begins by setting the stage - her family, the boy, the night, the morning after, and the startling realization that one split-second moment of weakness had altered her life forever.  It follows her to a home for unwed mothers, the hospital, and back home, playing along with the lie her parents told about her absence.  It follows her into adulthood, marrying and having her own children, and then into the search for that first child.

I really enjoyed this book.  I found the premise intriguing, especially given the fact that having a baby out of wedlock means something so radically different now than it did nearly fifty years ago.  I liked her simple, graceful writing style, and the fact that she was so honestly blunt about things other women might choose to exclude.  I felt a kinship with her for almost all of the book (except when she went through her hippy-pot-smoking-God-is-a-sham-and-so-is-my-life phase).  Being a mother, I can only imagine what it would be like to give up that baby.  Your baby.  Ugh.  But a good read, all the same.