The Lost Child of Philomena Lee: A Mother, Her Son and a 50 Year Search by Martin Sixsmith

When she became pregnant as a teenager in Ireland in 1952, Philomena Lee was sent to a convent to be looked after as a “fallen woman.” Then the nuns took her baby from her and sold him, like thousands of others, to America for adoption. Fifty years later, Philomena decided to find him.

Meanwhile, on the other side of the Atlantic, Philomena’s son was trying to find her. Renamed Michael Hess, he had become a leading lawyer in the first Bush administration, and he struggled to hide secrets that would jeopardize his career in the Republican Party and endanger his quest to find his mother.

A gripping exposé told with novelistic intrigue, Philomena pulls back the curtain on the role of the Catholic Church in forced adoptions and on the love between a mother and son who endured a lifelong separation.

The biggest problem I had with this book is that it is written almost like a novel. We see things from the point of view of someone the author never met. Conversations are written that we know the author could not have heard. Even taking into account that those conversations may have been passed on to others before the two conversationalists died, there’s no way those people could have remembered them, word for word. Yet, more often than not, that’s exactly how they’re presented.

I read the book after seeing the movie that was based on it, though even “based on” is a stretch. While the movie is the story of Philomena’s search, the book is almost totally the story of her son. I did like that, because the movie had left me wondering about him, and the book answered some questions that the movie did not. But I probably would have liked the book more if a bit more of Philomena’s story had been included.

But even with its faults, the book is very interesting, shedding much needed light on what was done to these girls, and to their children, by the Catholic Church.




Mount TBR 2017 Book Links

Links are to more information regarding each book or author, not to the review.

1. The Lost Girls
2. Hillbilly Elegy
3. Our Revolution
4. Requiem for Athens
5. Dark Angels
6. Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee
7. The Last Kingdom
8. The Lost Child of Philomena Lee: A Mother, Her Son and a 50 Year Search