For my first nonfiction read of 2020, I decided to try The Miracle & Tragedy of the Dionne Quintuplets. This young adult novel caught my eye in Barnes and Noble a few months back and has been in the back of my mind ever since. I'd never heard of the Dionne Quintuplets before reading it, but the inside flap of the book sounded fascinating. I knew I wanted to pick this one up early on in my True Books 2020 Challenge, so I started in on it this week.
The novel tells the story of Yvonne, Annette, Cécile, Émilie, and Marie Dionne, a set of quintuplets born in 1934 to a working class family in Ontario. Weighing a total of 13 pounds at birth, the girls were not expected to survive, but due to the vigilance of a dedicated medical team and plenty of donations from their public, they all managed to pull through. The sisters quickly became international celebrities, with tourists from all over the world writing them letters, sending them gifts, and even driving to the Dionne property to try and catch a glimpse of them through their windows.
In an effort to protect the girls from both their overly-adoring fans and enterprising hucksters looking to exploit them for financial gain, the government of Ontario seized custody of them and placed them in a custom-built hospital directly across the street from their parents' tiny farmhouse. For the next nine years of their lives, the quints were put on display to the public. Visitors to the hospital could watch them at play through one-way viewing screens, and thousands showed up each month to do so. In addition to the public displays, the quints' images were used in advertising, they did voicework on radio programs, and they even appeared in a few movies. The money they earned was put into a trust fund for them, which helped support their family and pay for the team of doctors and nurses that cared for them. They made their once-poor family very wealthy, but all was not well underneath the happy, sweet image their government-appointed guardians promoted.
Throughout the nine years the girls lived away from their family, their parents were engaged in a bitter fight with the government and their medical team to try and get them back. They eventually succeeded in bringing their daughters home, but the toll the fight took on everyone was tremendous. The girls found themselves unable to relate to their parents and other siblings, and their parents' frustration at their reticence to engage manifested in all different kinds of abuse. To complicate matters further, the girls' sheltered upbringing left them unable to function normally in society. Even the simplest of things, from shopping for their own clothing to going on dates, had to be learned from scratch once they became adults. Their struggles did not even improve with time, as leaving home, attending college, and starting their own families was fraught with difficulty for them. The Miracle &Tragedy of the Dionne Quintuplets is a detailed record of a very strange and sad little chapter of history, in which government overreach, poverty, and greed came together in a way that spelled disaster for five innocent children.
This book was absolutely fascinating, and I raced through it in just a couple of days. Sara Miller's narration is detailed and well-researched. Her writing style is appropriately clear and straightforward enough for a young adult audience, and there are many pictures included throughout the text to give readers additional context for the events of the story. Each chapter is titled using the actual titles of old newspaper and magazine articles regarding the quints, which I thought was a very nice touch. It helped reinforce the idea that every detail of this family's life was being reported on and consumed by the public, even into their adult years.
Miller also succeeds at presenting a balanced account of the Dionne's situation, explaining the viewpoints of the Dionne family, the doctors and nurses that cared for the girls, the government officials involved in their care, and, of course, the quints themselves. Looking at each of these viewpoints was one of the most engaging aspects of the book for me, because it really leads you on a roller coaster of emotions as the story develops. At first you feel sorry for the Dionne parents and outraged at the government overstepping their bounds, but once the girls go home, you start to lose sympathy for Mama and Poppa Dionne very quickly and wonder if government guardianship wasn't the right choice after all. Then, you start to question what things might have been like if the government had never intervened in the first place. However, after that, you remember that the girls would never had survived their infancy without that government interference. The situation is complex and it's tough to pull any simple conclusions from it, especially since many of the people involved were making decisions based on what they thought was in the best interest of the children. It was interesting to grapple with questions of responsibility and ethics while reading.
While I did really enjoy learning about the Dionne Quintuplets as an adult reader, I did question Miller's decision to write this as a young adult book. I do not think that the first half of the story will hold teen readers' interest for long. While it is well-written, it is fairly dry. As a young reader, you'd have to have some pretty well-developed reading stamina to make it through all the descriptions of the girls' lives in the hospital and the endless tug of war between their parents and their medical care team. I also think that a lot of teens lack the background knowledge required to pick up on the deeper themes of the story. A lot of what happens to the Dionne Quints happens because they were born poor, and most of the students I teach aren't exactly well-versed in the politics of classism and poverty. I teach eighth grade. I know that most of my students would be bored by this.
Furthermore, the second half of the story gets into some very tough topics that not all young readers might be ready to process. There are no real warning that these topics are coming, either. There was a point in the novel where my jaw dropped open and my heart sank into my stomach at what these girls went through. This is definitely a book for older teens, and you probably wouldn't think that just from looking at the cover and reading the summary. As the plot moves on, things only get worse for everyone involved in the story. There is not a happy ending here, and not a lot of lessons to take away from it. The story is very interesting, of course, but I don't think it's necessarily the best topic for young adult nonfiction. So, after reading, I was left curious as to who exactly this book is really for. it would be a special young adult reader indeed that is able to maintain their interest all the way through and have a sophisticated enough understanding of the world to truly engage with the topic.
Despite that, however, I really enjoyed The Miracle & Tragedy of the Dionne Quintuplets. It was a detailed and thorough account of an odd piece of history I had never heard of before. While the story was a sad one, it does provide a lot of interesting points to mull over about poverty, parenting, greed, human rights, fame, and ethics. I probably would not recommend this book to teens, but I would definitely recommend it to adults who are interested in learning about the Dionne Quints. This was a great way to start off my True Books 2020 Challenge. I'm realizing that I actually miss reading nonfiction, and I'm already looking forward to picking up another nonfiction novel next month.
Challenge Tally
True Books 2020: 1/12
Total Books Read in 2020: 4
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