The Home for Wayward Girls

The Home for Wayward Girls follows Loretta—now a successful New Yorker and founder of a nonprofit for runaways—as she prepares for a defining public conference and a high-stakes interview that could expose the truth about her childhood. Alternating between present-day New York City and a remote ranch “west of the Rockies,” the novel reveals how Loretta grew up inside her father William’s punitive “home” for so-called immoral girls, where silence, humiliation, and fear are used as tools of control.

At seventeen, Loretta forms a life-saving bond with a new resident, Elsie, and the two begin plotting escape while trying to protect the other girls. As Loretta’s courage rises, William’s violence escalates—until a chaotic breaking point forces Loretta into a desperate flight that changes everything. Years later, Loretta must face what she’s buried: guilt, trauma, and the question of what justice—and healing—can truly look like.

• Listeners who like character-driven novels about survival, trauma, and hard-won selfhood.
• Readers interested in stories that confront institutional abuse and the “troubled teen” ecosystem through a fictional lens.
• Book clubs looking for layered moral questions—culpability, forgiveness, and what it means to reclaim a life.

Marcia Bradley is a fiction writer and educator. She earned an MFA from Sarah Lawrence College, received a BRIO Award for Fiction, and has been published in multiple literary outlets. She grew up in Chicago, lived in Santa Monica, and later moved to New York, where she teaches and writes.