I wanted to love this book, especially with such a compelling premise. I’ve really been into memoirs lately and while this was so well written I just couldn’t get into the story. It felt repetitive at times and other times I just lost focus.interest. I commend the author for taking this story and turning it into a novel, I do wish I had connected a bit more with it.

When considering the atrocities that occurred in Ireland's infamous Magdalene laundries and mother and baby homes, one can't help feeling a sense of the incomprehensibility of such monstrousness on an institutional level: How could this have happened? In her new book, "Missing Persons, or My Grandmother's Secrets," Clair Wills makes this public question personal, as she investigates the dark secrets her own family kept for generations, and unearths the mothers and babies that are missing from her family's sanctioned story.

Wills, who grew up in England as the daughter of an English father and an Irish mother, spent what she remembers as halcyon summers at her Irish grandmother's dilapidated farm in County Cork. But years later, when Wills discovers that her Uncle Jackie had fathered Mary, the child of his teenage neighbor Lily, in the 1950s, and that this child and her mother were exiled to a mother and baby home and later abandoned to an orphanage, Wills sees these long-ago summers in a new and much more unflattering light. A further chance revelation about her grandmother Molly complicates Wills' memories even more, leaving her with the sense that her family's secretive history, far from being unique, was merely one of many similar stories all over Ireland that reflected the country's troubled institutional history writ small.

"Missing Persons" is hard to categorize--part memoir, part social history, part investigative account--and is at times difficult to read, but the story Willis tells deserves to find an audience, not only because she tells it so well, but because these missing persons deserve to have it told. Thank you to NetGalley and to Farrar, Straus and Giroux for providing me with an ARC of this title in return for my honest review.

A beautifully descriptive exploration of family secrets and social history.

The parallels between women of multiple generations was central to this memoir. Yet the way these women dealt with the predicament of pre-marital pregnancy was vastly different due to the social climates of the times in which they lived. Molly, the author's grandmother, simply married in the early 1900s, giving birth to her first child shortly after. But as time progressed to the 1950s, Lily, the parter of Wills's uncle, was banished to one of the newly opened mother and baby homes run by the Roman Catholics as a "refuge" for unwed mothers. Eventually we learn the story of the writer herself, who became a single mother in more recent history (when society began to tolerate women of such status).

I became interested in the history of Ireland's mother and baby homes and magdalene laundries after reading the Claire Foster's novella "Small Things like These." In descriptive prose, Wills explores this grim period of history, weaving in her own research with a family narrative. I found the historical components very informative and shocking.

I found myself drawn in, captivated by the first few chapters. But the author's continued cycling of her family history became somewhat repetitive and slow as the memoir progressed. As a memoir following ordinary people in extraordinary circumstances, I would have preferred the story line focused more on the latter than the former.

Overall 3.5/5 for beautiful prose and a good depiction of this controversial period of Irish history.

Thank you to NetGalley/ Farrar, Straus and Giroux for the eARC !

For me a bit of disappointment. I think the author has probably written this book for herself as a kind of therapy in her search for answers to understand her past and her feelings of shame and guilt. However, as an external reader, it does not bring much. There is some information about social history in Ireland, hence the 3*, but also a few repetitions about her feelings which are unnecessary, I felt.
I received a complimentary digital ARC of this book from NetGalley and I am leaving voluntarily an honest review.