Join us for a discussion of the book Looking for Jane by Heather Marshall. Copies of the book are available at the reference desk.

"Mothers and daughters, secrets and lies. Canadian writer Marshall makes an absorbing debut with a timely novel about the complexities of pregnancy and motherhood: “About wanting to be a mother and not wanting to be a mother, and all the gray areas in between,” as she writes in an author’s note. Her deftly braided narrative, which takes place in Toronto beginning in the 1960s, focuses on three women whose lives have been deeply affected by the struggle over women’s reproductive rights in Canada, which finally ended in 1988 with a groundbreaking decision to legalize abortion. In 1960, though, Evelyn Taylor is sent to St. Agnes’s Home for Unwed Mothers, where she is forced to give up her daughter for adoption. In 1979, Nancy Mitchell is horrified by witnessing a cousin’s sordid back-alley abortion; and in 2017, Angela Creighton, who had been adopted as an infant, is undergoing rounds of in vitro fertilization so that she and her wife can have the baby they long for. Angela sets events in motion when she opens a misdirected letter addressed to a Nancy Mitchell, a wrenching confession from Nancy’s dying mother telling her daughter that she had been adopted and sharing, at last, the name of her birth mother. Angela’s efforts to find Nancy lead her to another discovery: of an underground network of abortion providers, staffed by physicians who risked their lives and careers to help women end unwanted pregnancies. They called themselves the Janes. One of the abortion providers is Evelyn, who became a physician in response to the trauma and “crippling sense of helplessness, and lack of control over her own life” she had suffered at St. Agnes’s. Nancy, sympathetic to the cause, volunteers as an administrator, booking and scheduling patients. Although the three lives intersect a bit too neatly, Marshall keeps the tension high as she reveals the devastating consequences of denying women autonomy over their bodies. A charged topic handled with sensitivity and compassion." -- Kirkus Reviews