The Story of Beautiful Girl by Rachel Simon

A novel about a young girl (Lynnie) with learning difficulties who is sent to an American mental hospital by her family in the 1950s. Lynnie falls in love with a fellow patient, a deaf man, who helps her run away whilst pregnant with an abusive warden's child. Although Lynnie is eventually returned to the hospital, her baby is born during the brief escape and is brought up by an elderly widow.

I really enjoyed the writing in this novel, which is easy to read but also very poignant ("Self pity is a worse adversary than ignorance"). The characters are complex but well portrayed so surprisingly easy to engage with. The novel is narrated by different characters but the narrative is not disjointed so the overall thread is very compelling. A well written and enjoyable novel.