After disagreeing with their father over her interactions with a traveling gypsy family and his indiscretions, Luella disappears, so Effie finagles her way into the House of Mercy, a home for wayward girls, but doesn’t find Luella there. Instead she discovers that she is trapped there, because no one believes wayward girls. Born with a hole in her heart in the early 20^th century, her family has considered Effie to be living on borrowed time her entire life. Now she struggles to breathe while working hard labor, since the nuns at House of Mercy are unaware of her condition. A girl with a vague past named Mable plots escape with her, and Mable’s heart-rending story then intertwines with Effie’s. Burdick carefully lays out the challenges in Effie’s family and the obstacles of a misogynistic society that conspired to place her in such an undesirable and dangerous situation. The author provides further information on these mislabeled prisons for girls whose sexuality or unwanted status placed them there, and she also addresses the controversial use of “gypsy” as a historical reference that people in that era would have been most familiar with and used themselves. I received a digital copy of this excellent historical fiction from the publisher Park Row through NetGalley.