Invisible Thread by Maree Giles

This is a story about a young girl in Sydney, Australia in 1970 and the dreadful Parramatta Girls’ Training School.  The main character is fourteen-year-old Ellen Russell who has been living with her boyfriend Robbie and as such, is deemed to have put herself in moral danger.  For this reason, Ellen is arrested and sent to Parramatta Girls' Training School.  She is pregnant and her baby is forcibly taken from her at birth.  I expected the story to concentrate on Ellen’s time in the Girls' Training School, but the main focus is on the loss of her baby and how Ellen struggles to come to terms with this.     In writing the novel, which was published in 2001, Maree Giles called on her real life experience of the Parramatta Girls’ Training School where she was incarcerated for several months as a sixteen-year-old.