In Victorian-era Louisville, the Home for Friendless Women is run by benevolent benefactors with one mission: to reform the fallen women who live there into pious mothers and wives through religious lessons and hard work.
For Ruth, a college student who’s expelled after a campus sexual assault, the Home is a purgatory to endure before she can get her life back. For Belle, a queer sex worker who exchanged her bed at a brothel for one in the Home, it’s a safe place to rest her feet until she can track down her missing lover. And for Minnie, the daughter of the religious couple who founded the charity, the Home is her mother’s idea of a cautionary tale.
But as Minnie prepares for the Home’s silver anniversary party, she finds herself questioning the true cost of good intentions—and grappling with a terrible secret that has the power to unravel the Home entirely.
Genre: Historical
For Ruth, a college student who’s expelled after a campus sexual assault, the Home is a purgatory to endure before she can get her life back. For Belle, a queer sex worker who exchanged her bed at a brothel for one in the Home, it’s a safe place to rest her feet until she can track down her missing lover. And for Minnie, the daughter of the religious couple who founded the charity, the Home is her mother’s idea of a cautionary tale.
But as Minnie prepares for the Home’s silver anniversary party, she finds herself questioning the true cost of good intentions—and grappling with a terrible secret that has the power to unravel the Home entirely.
Genre: Historical
Praise for this book
"Hill is deliciously unsentimental and humanist in her rendering of these women and their world, resulting in a historical novel that feels both accurate and strikingly modern. A delight from start to finish." - Rufi Thorpe
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Used availability for Kelly Hill's A Home for Friendless Women