Girls and Their Monsters

 

I really wanted to like this book. It sounded so interesting: in 1930, Sadie Morlok gave birth to identical quadruplet girls. Right from the start, the girls garnered a lot of media attention. There was even a contest to name them. Sadie and her overbearing, abusive husband Carl, vacillated between trying to keep the girls cloistered in a bubble and using them to their advantage. The girls toured when they were little, wearing matching outfits and dancing and singing. But Carl refused to let them go to friends' houses or invite anyone over. They went to a dance in high school and he drove over to the school and straight up lied, telling them their mother was in the hospital, to make them leave. When he drove them home instead of the hospital, his response was something like "you had enough fun". 

In their early 20s, the girls were all diagnosed with various types of schizophrenia. It was heartbreakingly tragic what these poor girls were put through in the name of science. Only one of them, Sarah, managed a semi-normal life, working outside of the home, getting married, having two sons. The other girls tried to leave home and work, only to fail and have to come back. Carl died relatively young, but Sadie took care of them for as long as she could, until she passed away. 

The parts of the book about the Morlok quadruplets was interesting, but Farley went far afield and started talking about the history of mental health care in America and all its shortcomings. I felt like those observations really deserved their own book, not to be kind of shoehorned into this one. As soon as I would reach one of those passages the book literally ground to a screeching halt. I had to slog through them. It's too bad, if she'd just stayed on topic it would have been a really fascinating book.