Book Review: The Foundling by Stacey Halls

 
I read Stacey Hall's first book, The Familiars, as soon as it was released in 2019, and enjoyed it despite my general aversion to historical fiction. When I saw that she had come out with a new book, I added it to my TBR and forgot all about it until I saw it in a good deal in a book shop a few weeks ago and immediately decided to pick it up. See below for my thoughts.
 

From Goodreads:
 

"London, 1754. Six years after leaving her newborn, Clara, at London's Foundling Hospital, young Bess Bright returns to reclaim the illegitimate daughter she has never really known. Dreading the worst - that Clara has died in care - the last thing she expects to hear is that her daughter has already been reclaimed. Her life is turned upside down as she tries to find out who has taken her little girl - and why.

 

 

Les than a mile from Bess' lodgings in a quiet town house, a wealthy widow barely ventures outside. When her close friend - an ambitious doctor at the Foundling Hospital - persuades her to hire a nursemaid for her young daughter, she is hesitant to welcome someone new into her home and her life. But her past is threatening to catch up with her - and will soon tear her carefully constructed world apart.

 

Set against the vibrant backdrop of Georgian London, 'THE FOUNDLING' explores families and secrets, class and power, and how the pull of motherhood cuts across them all."

 

My thoughts:

 

I say I have a general aversion to historical fiction because I often just find myself picking holes in impossible story lines and thinking how XYZ in the novel would never have happened in reality. This pickiness is one result of doing a history degree; the other is that I spent the better half of three years reading nothing but historical non-fiction, so the idea of reading historical fiction for pleasure has been completely beaten out of me over time. I do however like to give the odd one a go, because of course some historical fiction books contain great stories which also examine historical issues with emotional depth and complexity.

 

I do not think that The Foundling is one of these books - but I'm not saying that I didn't enjoy it. In fact, I was hooked by it after the first chapter - and finished it in a few days by squeezing it in before and after work (and on my lunch breaks too!). The writing is compelling, and the story is very fast paced, so you're never left hanging for too long, which keeps the momentum high throughout the novel.

 

That said, sometimes the book moved a little too quickly for my liking. I expected a lot of suspense around who had taken Bess's daughter - but there was none. Within around 30 pages of her finding out Clara is missing, we're presented with the answer of who took her. Everything was just a little bit too neat - for example, whenever Bess had a problem to solve, a new character was suddenly introduced into the storyline who presented her with the answer. It was this element of the book which made it feel so unrealistic for me - there was no sense of Bess as the main character searching for and working towards a solution.

 

The subject matter of this book is extremely interesting, and in fact I knew nothing about the realities of The Foundling hospital before I read it. Similar to Halls' last novel, which focuses on witches in early modern England, she picks really good history to write about - and I love that she illuminates these vastly underrated periods of history with her fiction. There's also clearly a lot of solid research which goes behind her work, which is always something to be appreciated in a historical fiction writer.

 

I do think however, that she tackles these topics with a slight lack of depth. The description of this book sells it as one which tackles the complexities of women's roles in the past, as well as intersectionality between class and gender. I don't think this is necessarily true. I think Halls' subject matter inevitably throws up issues of historical views of women and motherhood - she's writing about a hospital where women gave up their children because they couldn't afford to care for them or had had them out of wedlock. I don't think, however, that the book explores the complexities of this - it's a plot driven book rather than a social study of the characters within it. This makes for entertaining reading, but it does feel overall rather simplistic, and the themes which the marketing claims it is based on are certainly never explicitly addressed throughout.

 

Overall, I enjoyed this book, because it made for light, entertaining reading - and I would recommend it for this. If you are looker for a slightly deeper historical fiction which really digs into the themes of the era in which it is based - I would give this one a miss.