Townsend’s intentions are good, but they could still do harm the same is true of the clinic director, who believes she is doing the right thing even as she steals the sisters’ future choices and their sense of control over their own bodies. But Perkins-Valdez skillfully unsettles the easy definitions of “help,” asking readers to question the notion of good intentions. Immediately sympathetic to their plight, she wants to help, and with her relative wealth and connections, she can. Her experience as a Black woman in the South could not be called easy, but she acknowledges the vast sea between her experience and that of Erica and India.

Raised in upper-middle-class Centennial Hill, Civil is the daughter of a doctor and an artist. These nurses are the witnesses who never testified, and Take My Hand considers whether their silence makes them complicit. Weinberger, provides a solid foundation for the narrative, but when Perkins-Valdez couldn’t find a firsthand account from any of the nurses who worked at the real clinic during that time, she created one in Civil Townsend. Substantial research into the original case, Relf v.

Inspired by true events in 1970s Alabama, the book shines a light on a painful part of U.S. Outraged, Civil fights on their behalf, working with a talented young lawyer who ultimately takes their case all the way to federal court. But at 11 and 13, Erica and India are terribly young, a fact that troubles Civil even before she sees the depth of their poverty and long before the white clinic director facilitates surgical sterilization for both girls. She believes in the clinic’s mission and is determined to facilitate choice for women in her community. On her first visit to the girls’ home, Civil is tasked with giving them birth control injections, a common practice, especially for younger patients who might have trouble with a daily pill.

Civil Townsend, a Black physician at the end of her career who can’t be at peace until she shares the story of Erica and India, sisters who were unlikely patients of the family planning clinic where Civil worked as a nurse. This diamond-bright historical novel opens in 2016, but the heart of the story takes place through the narrator recounting her experience as a nurse in Montgomery, Alabama, in 1973. Memphis native Dolen Perkins-Valdez has spent some time with these questions, and the result is her third novel, Take My Hand.

Take My Hand by Dolen Perkins-Valdez