The Lies They Told

Ellen Marie Wiseman has built a career on novels that pull forgotten American injustices into the light, and The Lies They Told may be her most unsettling yet.

Lena, a young unwed mother, is the heart of the story. She arrives at Ellis Island and witnesses the separation of immigrant families. Determined to keep her two-year-old daughter, she faces a harsh inspection that results in her mother and teenage brother, traveling with her, being labeled as burdens and deported back to Germany. She and her daughter are now alone and move in with Silas, a reluctant relative, at his cabin in Virginia's Blue Ridge Mountains.

Her journey is long and hard, pulling you in emotionally and, at times, hard to read. Her story contrasts her desperate need to belong with her need to survive as the horrors of this era overshadow her life. She faces many challenges. The State of Virginia schemes to evict Silas from his land and seize her baby and Silas's children. Lena is also accused of promiscuity and feeblemindedness and sent to the Virginia State Colony for the Feebleminded and Epileptics. This was a real place where women were often sterilized, sometimes without understanding what was being done to them.

What makes these chapters so chilling is not cruelty from monsters but the calm, bureaucratic confidence of doctors, social workers, and judges who believed they were improving the human race.

I think what really hit home for me was how the immigrant experiences depicted in this book mirror modern-day immigration realities through the trauma of forced family separations and the prejudice that labeled Lena's family as "burdens to society," paralleling today's methods that often characterize new arrivals as liabilities rather than human beings seeking safety and opportunity.

The Lies They Told will appeal to fans of Kristin Hannah and Lisa Wingate's Before We Were Yours, and to those interested in historical fiction focused on social justice. It's also good for book clubs, raising questions about defining "normal," the misuse of science for prejudice, our obligations to newcomers, and the impact of labeling communities as disposable.