A girl who found herself pregnant and unmarried had few options in 1950s Ireland, even if the father is someone she loves and plans to marry. In The Whipping Club by Deborah Henry, Marian is determined to do just that, despite one big potential obstacle: her lover is Jewish, not Catholic. Her first meeting with her potential in-laws does not go well; so much so that she decides not to tell Ben that she is pregnant and instead allows her priest uncle to spirit her away to a convent where the nuns (barely) care of the girls until they give birth.

The baby boy being given away, Marian returns home where she does marry her Jewish Ben after all, and they have another child, a girl. Their marriage is troubled in part by the secret Marian is keeping, and eventually, when she learns that the boy was not adopted but rather sent to a notorious orphanage, she begins her quest to bring him back to the family. The horrors he has seen in his first 12 years make it difficult for him to adapt to living in a normal family, and trouble ensues.

This book showed a lot of promise in its setup and its characters, but it's not particularly well developed. The first half, in particular, suffers from a meandering point of view that makes it difficult to tell whose thoughts we are meant to be following. A paragraph might start with Marian's thoughts and end with Ben's, or so it seemed. The scene shifts from place to place with a startling abruptness at times, and things are revealed in an oblique way that makes you think you will learn more about them later but you never do.

A lot of these problems clear up in the second part of the book, when the boy gets sent to a sort of horrific reform school where he suffers a great deal under the hands of the Christian Brothers who run it, but by then the reader is exasperated both with the characters and the writing. Three-fourths of the way through, the tone suddenly shifts to suspense in a book that had little to that point, and the ending seems unsatisfying and unfinished.

The Whipping Club is difficult at times to read because of the abuse the children face, and at other times because it's simply not written well. None of the characters are particularly likable, and while we are given endless passages inside their minds and thoughts, I still had difficulty understanding why either Marian or Ben chose to ever get married or stay married. In short, not a book I'd recommend in its current form. ( )

What a powerful, amazing story! When I finished it this morning I was emotionally drained and wanting to know "what happened next".
The beginning of the novel did not prepare me for the complexity of the plot and the masterful story telling that was to follow.
Just one terrific book!!

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The Whipping Club by Deborah Henry follows Ben and Marian, a mixed couple of Jewish and Catholic backgrounds, their daughter Johanna, and their son, Adrian, who Marian gave up for adoption ten years earlier. Set in Ireland, the first chapter opens in 1957, but the novel is primarily set ten years later, 1967 and on. Finding herself pregnant before they married, Marian gives up Adrian, the couples first child, after staying in a Catholic home for unwed mothers. She and Ben marry later, and have their daughter, Johanna, but Marian is rife with guilt over giving up their son. Then she learns that Adrian was never adopted but was, instead, given over to an orphanage.

Marian tells Ben her secret, discovering that he already knew it, and the couple set out to find and then add their son back into their family. This struggle then illuminates the injustice and abuse orphans and unwanted children suffered at the hands of the Catholic run system in Ireland. At the same time their daughter Johanna is also facing religious intolerance based on her parentage.

The Whipping Club is a melancholy, bleak page turner. We experience Marian's (unnamed) depression, the brutality in the orphanages, the uncertainty that there is a satisfactory conclusion to the myriad of hopeless situations present. Henry is an adept writer and she does a good job with character development, even when several major characters were not very appealing. The story did keep my interest right up to the end. The descriptions of the brutal treatment of the children at the orphanages is horrific.

I did have a few qualms about the novel. First, while The Whipping Club is well written, the actual dialogue didn't fully convey the emotional upheavals the characters are experiencing. My biggest hesitation about the novel was that, as I was reading, the first part of the novel seemingly was heading one way and then diverged to another direction. While this could be describing an intriguing plot development shift, unfortunately in this case it feels more like the intent became obscured by a switch of focus and some clarity of purpose was lost.

Perhaps my reservations about the novel could be answered by integrating all the characters right from the beginning and weaving their stories together toward a final conclusion. That might have required rewriting the entire novel, a daunting prospect for a novel that really is not badly written to begin with.

So, in the end, I enjoyed reading The Whipping Club but I am feeling a dichotomy over rating it. It is a very well written novel and I've been known to rate based on writing ability. I've also been known to rate based on exciting plots in spite of the writing. Here we have skillful writing but the main storyline of the novel felt like it loss it's original focus and changed direction to a different focus - but different isn't always bad.

I've decided to Highly Recommended The Whipping Club, for a first novel, and watch for promising future novels by Henry.

Disclosure: I received an advanced reading copy of this book from the publisher and TLC for review purposes.
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I won a copy of this book a long time ago, but put off reading it because it looked like it was going to be so heavy. It turned out not to be what I thought, but I'm not sure it was better. This is a hard on to review objectively because I just so strongly disliked it. Everything in this book is grim, even the theoretically happy(ish) ending. It's all people feeling miserable and being miserable to each-other, especially those in position of authority, and all of that misery is offloaded onto the shoulders of a blameless 11-year-old boy. Even the kind characters are often complacent in horrendous abuses. I felt bad when I finished this book and I do not enjoy that experience.

I can say that I had trouble with the points of view. It stared centered solely on Marian and remained so long enough that I settled into the single POV, but then another one popped up and then another and another until we had an omniscient narrator. But it felt willy-nilly. I also sometimes had trouble telling what was meant to be current and what was memory or flashback.

And honestly, I just didn't particularly like any of the characters. I appreciated that Marian was educated and taught by her father to think for herself and be proud of her differences, something you don't see in a lot of mid-60s female characters, but I didn't relate to her. The only ones I came close to caring about were Adrian and Peter and they were brutalized. Peter especially, I felt he was little more than Henry's whipping boy, like she wanted this horrible thing to happen but didn't want to irrevocably contaminate her sympathetic character.

Then, it finished with this rousing declaration to protect the innocent and fight the good fight with a strength of will I didn't sense in any of the characters up that point. In the end, those who actually enjoy depressing book club books this may enjoy this. But it wasn't a winner for me. ( )

It is hard to imagine the pain of being pushed, basically forced, into giving your child up for adoption. It is even harder to imagine the pain felt when you discover that the pleasant life you thought your child was leading couldn't be farther from the reality he is suffering in. Deborah Henry puts her readers right in the midst of that pain, creating characters that you root for and despise and love and hate, sometimes all at once (there were times it was hard to like Marian).

I think a successful work of historical fiction makes the reader want to find out more. The Whipping Club makes me want to read more about the birthing homes, orphanages and Jewish/Catholic/Protestant prejudice in Ireland. I know these things exist elsewhere but the book has specifically sparked my interest in those of Ireland.

As far as the main overall story, I would actually give this book a 5, but I am giving it a 4 because I felt like there were a lot of loose ends in the subplots. I didn't feel like there was strong enough or clear enough resolution in Marian's relationships with her mother-in-law, her daughter, even her husband. I also want to know what happened with the investigation into Surtane, if the Catholics even allowed an actual investigation. Since there doesn't seem to be room for a sequel, an epilogue would have worked well.



*received a free digital copy through netGalley
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