When No One Else Will

By: Amanda Skenandore

Narrated by: Nicole Poole

In the fall of 1939, while Europe grapples with the outbreak of war, Mimi Lukas wages a private battle in her Chicago neighborhood. Her husband, Stan, once a promising White Sox player, has been sidelined by a broken leg. His hopes of returning to baseball are dwindling along with their savings. As Stan sinks into inertia, Mimi resolves to go back to nursing.

When a friend tells her of a women's clinic in need of a nurse, Mimi hesitates. Such places are illegal and at odds with her religious upbringing. But Dr. Gabler’s office isn't the dingy establishment Mimi envisioned. The space is clean, bright, and welcoming, the staff skillful. Patients are treated with dignity and compassion, even as they are sworn to secrecy about what happens within its walls.

The patients, too, are not who Mimi expected. Some are heartbreakingly young. Most are married, and many already have children. Police and state prosecutors are paid handsomely to turn a blind eye. As Mimi finds kinship with her colleagues and with an officer on retainer, she begins her own private reckoning between what is legal and what is necessary, no matter how painful or inconvenient. But Mimi senses the tide turning against them. She knows, too, that soon she must decide how much she will risk to defend the ideals she's come to embrace through hard-won experience . . .

©2026 Amanda Skenandore

Women’s rights - or lack there of

Amanda Skenandore shines a light on the reproductive difficulties and lack of agency American women have always faced. Her protagonist, Mimi’s husband doesn’t want her to work, but due to depression, he does nothing to help the family. Mimi ends up working in an illegal abortion clinic just prior to WWII.

Fantastic HF!!

I love this author and this book was no exception to her awesome research and character development!