How did your reading go this month? Did you read any historical fiction in December? This is our last month of the 2025 Online Reading Challenge! Are you finishing strong or do you still have some months to catch up on? Share in the comments!
I read our main title: Take My Hand by Dolen Perkins-Valdez. This novel was a gut-wrenching, but necessary, read that sent me down a rabbit hole of research into the events described within.
Told through alternating timelines, readers follow Civil Townsend in 1973 fresh out of nursing school and decades later after her career is established. In Montgomery, Alabama in 1973, Civil has a job at the Montgomery Family Planning Clinic, eager to help women make their own choices for their bodies and their lives. Her first patients out in the community are two young sisters, ages 11 and 13. Civil is shocked to learn that the clinic has decided that the girls need to be on birth control, given that they haven’t even kissed a boy and one hasn’t even started bleeding. Growing more concerned by the day, Civil discovers that something concerning is happening at the clinic and that those in power may be running an experiment similar to the Tuskegee Syphilis Study that ran from 1932 and 1972.
Her two patients are young, black, and poor, like many of the clinic’s patients. They may not understand the consequences of what they are agreeing to, given that many of them cannot read and are placing blind trust in the clinic staff and the government people. Civil wants to help so she spends time with her two young patients, growing closer with their family. One day she shows up at their house to discover that the unthinkable has happened. The consequences of what has happened will reverberate for decades through the community and through Civil’s relationships with family and friends.
Flash forward decades later and Civil has a grown daughter and an illustrious career. Called back to Alabama, she finds herself reliving her past on the cusp of retirement. She must not forget her past, even though it may make her uncomfortable.
Take My Hand by Dolen Perkins-Valdez is a historical fiction novel that I wish was required reading. Every part of this story had me yearning for justice: unregulated drugs were being given to women without proper knowledge, women and their families signed forms under duress, medical professionals decided amongst themselves who should or shouldn’t have children, and the government was using family planning clinics to sterilize people of color and minors without their consent. This isn’t even all the issues that Civil was fighting against in this story. While this story isn’t real, the events that happened within were actually happening to people in the past and still today. If you’re doubting whether reproductive injustice or medical racism exists, give Take My Hand a read.
Next month, we will be starting a brand new online reading challenge for 2026! I’m so excited to share the new challenge with you!
In addition to following the Online Reading Challenge here on our Info Cafe blog, you can join our Online Reading Challenge group on Goodreads and discuss your reads!