Today I’m excited to share with you this beautiful new book written by Heather Chapman called The Forgotten Girl. It is a based on a true story which in the end I found out was actually about Healther’s own grandmother. It is a beautiful story of trusting in God to direct our lives, having hope in the future and pushing through hard things.
The story is about the girl named Stella, also know and Stefania, from Poland. Her mother and father are dead and she is living with her brother and sister-in-law who treat her like a slave. The only good she relationships she has in her life is the relationship she has with her niece who she takes care of, and two boys from her village that she has been friends with since she was little! She knows she wants something more in lifand is determined to go to America to find it. She only feels like sadness and bad memories is all she has from living in Poland and she wants to escape that. She finally finds her way to America, but with a lot of hardship and struggle she has to find her happiness there. Not everything is as she expected.
I really enjoyed this book. We have actually been studying about this time in our history class in our homeschool, the time of the Industrial Revolution and a lot of people coming over to America trying to find a new life for themselves. The only part of the story that I didn’t love was that I wish there was more! More detail in each situation. We don’t read a lot about her being on the boat coming here, and some of the friendships she made there are never returned to. But I guess that’s like real life. Sometimes we meet people for certain reasons, and then we never see them again, we never know what happens to them. I guess I was expecting more of a typical romance where we find out what happens to everybody, but this story is different. The one thing I loved about this story, might also be something I didn’t love, and that is the things we never have answers to. What happened to certain people that showed up in her life.
One of the major themes I see in this story is that people come into our lives to help us through certain situations, we may never see them again or even understand why they were there until later. Stella went through a lot of hardships that when she looked back she realized there were people who loved her helping her through. When she came to America she wanted to be independent and free and she even had fear of getting married and having someone take care of her. She soon realized that she needed love in her life, she needed people that cared about her. The story is a very clean and beautiful story that I would recommend to anyone. I loved that it was a story that was based on her own grandmother’s life. In the back of the book Heather tells which parts she knows are true and which parts are mostly made up. Heather is a beautiful writer, and this book kept me wanting to read more from her.
Purchase The Forgotten Girl by Heather Chapman
