Julia MacDonnell's Hidden Girls: A Birth Mother's Story of Reunion and Reckoning brings readers into the emotional heart of adoption loss, showing how the secrets and silence of closed adoption permanently twist kinship histories and undermine the compassion of those involved in it. Writing about her experience, MacDonnell soon realized that the secret about her bastard son contained a host of other secrets evasions, and equivocations in her family and the culture at large. Hence her story was not only hers. Rather, it reflected the stories of countless other girls and women who'd lost their babies to secret adoption in the decades after World War II.