100 books like Suffer the Little Children

This isn’t directly about Magdalene laundries but about the hidden abuse suffered by children in religious institutions. When Paddy Doyle’s parents died in rural Ireland in 1955, he was sentenced in a district court – aged four – to eleven years’ detention in an industrial school for not possessing a legal guardian.

Despite ending up wheelchair bound, he became a passionate advocate for survivor’s rights. His memoir, The God Squad, broke so many taboos that mainstream Irish publishers wouldn’t publish it. It opened the door for other memoirs.

My tiny publishing house released it in 1988. My late wife and I spent our honeymoon putting covers on it. We risked losing our home if sued. But the book became an international bestseller. A deeply warm and courageous man, Paddy died in 2020.

This explosive exposé of an illegal trade that was hidden in plain sight was the first account of the lucrative practice of baby trafficking in Irish Magdalene laundries. It was run for profit by Irish nuns, administered by civil servants who doctored documents, and approved by bishops and politicians who kept it secret.

Mike Milotte’s exposé caused a sensation that was published in 1997. But, just like I felt about my book, he regarded the book as unfinished business. Therefore, in recent years he has published a revised edition incorporating many previously untold personal uncovered in the intervening period, as the full extent of his secretive child trade became known, with rich Americans visiting orphanages to pick babies to bring home with falsified documents, in exchange for generous donations to the nuns.

You have probably seen the film version starring Dame Judi Dench and Steve Coogan—which I also highly recommend! But Sixsmith’s original book demonstrates how an experienced yet disenchanted writer can find their own way, and make an international impact, by helping another person discover the hideous truth.

Philomena Lee was a woman from Roscrea, Ireland, who, after fifty years, could no longer endure the torment of not knowing what had happened to her toddler son, taken from her at a Catholic home for unwed mothers and sold to an American couple. Unbeknownst to Philomena, her son later went searching for her.

Sixsmith blends these two histories together in a story with many political and personal layers, including only an occasional, seamless glimpse of his amazing research process.

After my struggles to find a printer for The God Squad in 1988, it is refreshing to see how receptive readers are to this brave memoir by Maureen Sullivan, subtitled “My Story of Love and Loss as a Survivor of the Magdalene Laundries”.

When twelve years old, Sullivan told a teacher she was being sexually abused by her stepfather. A day later she was incarcerated in a Magdalene Laundry. The nuns promised to educated her. Instead she became their indentured slave, washing and scrubbing, with little food or water and subjected to beatings.

The title comes from how the nuns kept her hidden in a tunnel when government inspectors came. Novelists can try to imagine these worlds, but only a survivor (and campaigner for other survivors) like Sullivan can really capture that purgatory.

The Austins live in rural New England, where the four children take joy in nature, do chores cheerfully, and have a club committed to nonconformity. The family’s faith and interests in the arts and sciences are weaved seamlessly into their daily life. And although death is discussed throughout, themes of light and love permeate. 

This isn’t the most well-known of L’Engle’s books, but it’s a feel-good portrait of domestic life. If I had read it when I was young, I’m sure I would have wanted to be an Austin kid. Reading it as a mother, I want to crack the parents’ code.

One of Dr. Greene’s basic beliefs, reiterated often in this wise and compassionate book, is that “Kids do well if they can.” Instead of seeing their child as manipulative, attention-seeking, stubborn, controlling, or defiant, readers learn to understand that really, the child lacks some necessary skills: flexibility, adaptability, frustration tolerance, emotion regulation, and problem-solving. Using a combination of exposition, explanation, and stories from his decades of practice with troubled kids in many circumstances, Greene shows parents how to put the Collaborative and Proactive Solutions model into action. He reassures readers that—even if they’ve been doing it all wrong until now—there’s always room for growth and change, starting now. “Kids are resilient,” he writes. “They come around if we start doing the right thing.”

The stories are twisted and disturbing, and the artwork is just as awesome. This is the sort of book to give a kid (or even an adult) who says they don’t like reading. The books they beat you over the head with at school are boring enough to turn anyone into a non-reader; this little gem may just be the antidote to this situation.

Plenty of sociologists have gone into schools and tried to work out what kids think, but few have written about the experience as clearly, directly, and thoughtfully as Corrigan.

Corrigan did research with teenage working-class boys who attended two different schools in Sunderland in the early 1970s. He found, in short, that these boys did not like school; they especially did not like the fact that they were forced to go. This made Corrigan question why we make young people attend institutions that they hate, and which they do not benefit from.

Despite recent ‘progressive’ reforms in education, nothing had changed: ‘they didn’t like [school] when it was all maths and exams; they now didn’t seem to like it when it was all civics and projects’.

I’ve been a huge fan of Ross Greene’s work for a long time because he is changing the way parents and educators look at children with behavioral challenges. His powerful motto, “Kids do well when they can” is a call for teaching lagging executive skills, instead of punishing kids for having executive functioning challenges. Instead of thinking of a child with ADHD as being a “behavior problem” or “unmotivated”, Dr. Greene's Collaborative & Proactive Solutions (CPS) approach helps parents and educators focus on the true factors contributing to challenging behaviors, empowering educators to address these factors and create helping relationships with their most at-risk kids.

This novel intrigued me because of Robin, a young boy who cares deeply about endangered animals. Powers uses the child as a device to make readers think about our earth and its inhabitants. I did the same with the character in my novel. Both children agonize over how to make adults pay attention to the crisis we face.

While the plot centers on a father’s intense devotion to his struggling son, Powers succeeds in portraying nature’s magnificence and its increasing fragility. I am in awe of his ability to create such a page-turning plot in a message-driven book.