Potts remains to one side of the picture in her own book; this is not so much the story of her personal triumph over the odds, but how so many other promising young women, such as Darci, were blocked from following a similar path ... Potts’s findings are depressing, though perhaps more nuanced than expected ... The Forgotten Girls is written without sentimentality, but it is elegiac all the same: a lament for lost opportunities and wasted lives; a controlled expression of rage at a system that continues to fail so many even as it exploits their despair.
Potts blames a variety of systemic failings for Darci’s fate ... But she is at her most persuasive when she describes how religious fundamentalism... marginalizes women ... The book is awash in research, held together less by Potts’s own story than by Darci’s. The first 50 pages or so are mired in exposition ... Such data is interesting but at times gives the book the feel of a textbook. This is not to say we aren’t taken fully into this world of hardscrabble lives and tenuous survival ... I wanted Potts to be transparent about what she did and didn’t reveal to Darci.
If I have a reservation, it’s this: it’s easy, as a writer, to expose your own life; it’s ethically awkward to do the same to the vulnerable, even with consent. Inside every writer there is a sliver of ice, it’s said, and Potts, sympathetic and non-judgmental as she is, must have needed it because holding an addict to their word can in some lights be interpreted as further exploitation ... But Potts serves a greater good. The Forgotten Girls rings with authenticity, a powerful, feminist, politics-made-personal analysis of how women in poor, white, religious societies suffer.
Clear-eyed and tender ... Ms. Potts is well-positioned to explain her insular birthplace to outsiders ... People there trust her and speak to her candidly ... Readers might feel that the solution to the riddle of why one girl grew up to succeed and one to fail is hiding in plain sight: Ms. Potts, though poor like Ms. Brawner, came from a relatively stable family that prioritized education.
Potts pointedly examines the complicated relationship between two childhood friends who experienced radically different life outcomes, and she creates a compelling sociological and cultural portrait that illuminates the silent hopelessness destroying not just her own hometown, but rural communities across America.
