Fallen Grace by Mary Hooper

Hooper, Mary Fallen Grace, 320 p. Bloomsbury, FEB 2011.  Mature Content: PG-13 (girl is raped and buries her stillborn baby).  Grace Parkes and her sister Lily used to live a wonderful life, with a loving mother and father and nice things.  Now both parents are gone and the girls have left the orphanage after Grace was raped by a hidden man.  Their fortunes are swiftly on decline and what meager lodgings they have are precarious at best.  Life is harsh and cheap on the streets of 1860’s England.  When Grace is offered a job as a professional mourner for a funeral company, she may have found a way to keep the little family together.  But her new employers know something that Grace doesn’t – and they are willing to go to great lengths to keep her in the dark and take what they want for themselves.  Grace will have to find a friend if she is going to survive.  Hooper takes us back to historic England, exposing more of the sordid underbelly of that society.  She draws a poignant picture of a girl struggling to hold on despite her lowly circumstances.  While the theme is very Dickens-ian, this book is more accessible to those not up to that challenge., but does not pander to its audience.  HS – ADVISABLE. Cindy, Library Teacher