Jacinta Prunty has produced a lengthy and fastidiously researched book on a difficult and controversial topic. She was given privileged access to documents associated with the congregation of Our Lady of Charity and the Religious of the Good Shepherd in Ireland, a reform of the other order, in Angers, Caen and Rome. Other scholars have been refused similar access. In addition, diocesan and state archives have been examined in Ireland and elsewhere. The work is not simply an investigation of the institutions for women and girls but also of the religious life that motivated the nuns who cared for some of the most deprived women in Irish society. The congregation of Our Lady of Charity was never very large in Ireland and was confined to four monasteries in the diocese of Dublin. By 1973 there were only eighty-seven sisters in the Irish federation. The religious life of the nuns is sympathetically drawn by Prunty, who is herself a Sister of the Holy Faith. Her affiliation with a religious order does not, however, obscure her balanced judgements nor the rigorous analysis one would expect from a seasoned social historian. One difficulty in this particular instance is how to make sense of the structure of an order devised by John Eudes in the seventeenth century devoted to the care of girls and women who were often rejected by society, and sometimes by their own families, whose techniques were perfected in the nineteenth century, but whose administrative and apostolic model lingered well into the twentieth century. At various points in their long history some, at least, of the sisters appeared to have lost sight of the fundamental work of rehabilitation of ‘fallen women’, a fact made clear to them in the 1950s by another controversial figure in recent Irish history, Archbishop John McQuaid of Dublin. He in general disliked the ‘penitentiary’ nature of the nuns’ treatment of the women. By contrast the nuns themselves tended to see the women as unpaid servants whose labour enabled the laundries to survive financially. Not until 1954 did the nuns give such women ‘rewards’, and not until the early 1970s were they paid even minimal wages, although all their needs were taken care of. The scandals concerning Magdalen laundries, reformatory schools and industrial schools in Ireland will long overshadow this book and indeed the work of any historian who tries to write a volume that is not simply condemnatory of a system that was at times brutal and inhumane. But Prunty has demonstrated that not all those who were involved in the administration of these institutions were monsters, and not all the residents were mistreated. The work briefly reviews the principal critiques of the laundries and schools. But this is not primarily a work of apologetics and its main concern is with social and institutional history. Among the important points that Prunty stresses is that, as Margaret MacCurtain first pointed out, women religious were often pawns in a contest between Church and State, as bishops and governments struggled for control over the institutions that the nuns ran.