Swing and a miss from Karen Zacharias, who has chosen to create a fictionalized childhood for a young Virginia woman whose forced sterilization at the age of 17 became the subject of a Supreme Court case with far-reaching precedents. Zacharias is a talented and empathic writer who might better have set her sights on the system which allowed the practice, and what it meant to thousands of American girls and women in the early-to-mid 20th Century.
