Only the Beautiful
A Best Historical Fiction of Spring Pick by Amazon, PopSugar, AARP, and BookBub! A heartrending story about a young mother's fight to keep her daughter, and the terrible injustice that tears them apart, by the USA Today bestselling author of The Nature of Fragile Things and The Last Year of the War. California, 1938--When she loses her parents in an accident, sixteen-year-old Rosanne is taken in by the owners of the vineyard where she has lived her whole life as the vinedresser's daughter. She moves into Celine and Truman Calvert's spacious house with a secret, however--Rosie sees colors when she hears sound. She promised her mother she'd never reveal her little-understood ability to anyone, but the weight of her isolation and grief prove too much for her. Driven by her loneliness she not only breaks the vow to her mother, but in a desperate moment lets down her guard and ends up pregnant. Banished by the Calverts, Rosanne believes she is bound for a home for unwed mothers. But she soon finds out she is not going to a home of any kind, but to a place that seeks to forcibly take her baby - and the chance for any future babies - from her. Austria, 1947--After witnessing firsthand Adolf Hitler's brutal pursuit of hereditary purity--especially with regard to "different children"--Helen Calvert, Truman's sister, is ready to return to America for good. But when she arrives at her brother's peaceful vineyard after decades working abroad, she is shocked to learn what really happened nine years earlier to the vinedresser's daughter, a girl whom Helen had long ago befriended. In her determination to find Rosanne, Helen discovers a shocking American eugenics program--and learns that that while the war had been won in Europe, there are still terrifying battles to be fought at home.
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Community Reviews
“I now have five things that belong to me. The sun every morning, the cloisonne pendant, the silver key, Helen Calvert’s letter on how to care for an amaryllis, and the bargain I made. Six things, actually. I still have the colors…He hasn’t been able to rinse the colors from my head.”
Rosanne was born with a sensory anomaly called synesthesia. When she hears a sound or sees a shape or experiences a taste, her mind assigns colors to names and places and numbers. It’s an overlapping of senses, and its lack of diagnosis causes fear, discrimination and ultimately sterilization by others during our country’s eugenics experimentation.
“This was happening to people here, in America, long before the Nazis started doing it in Germany” with eugenics laws, “legislation that allows states to decide who among the institutionalized with so-called genetic flaws should be made unable to have children…so they can’t perpetuate a burden on society…the practice of sterilizing those with genetically undesirable traits…in the name of bettering society” a Nazi-esque notion of “building a race of only perfect people.”
“A book is always in many places at once. That is its singular wonder. A book takes one voice speaking and makes it many. A book can shine far brighter and longer than I ever could on my own…Not with a magic wand or hopeful thoughts or wishful thinking or mere words, but with courage and resolve and the refusal to allow those without voices to remain unheard. This is what makes us sublimely human…Not unsullied genetic perfection, but when we stubbornly love and honor one another. Just the way we are.”
Susan Meissner’s Only the Beautiful bursts with color, “the whorls of perhaps magenta, cerulean, and goldenrod, tumbling about like jewels from heaven…And they are beautiful.”
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