A Beach Read . . . About Eugenics?

The Foundling, by Ann Leary, is billed as a summer beach read and it meets those specifications: while there's no sun or sand in the novel-- it's quite gothic-- it's definitely a vacation for your brain, especially the second half, which has a very compelling escape plot, reminiscent of Shawshank Redemption; the book is an easy read, on the one hand, especially for historical fiction (the setting in a woman's asylum in Pennsylvania in 1927, the Nettleton State Village for Feebleminded Women of Childbearing Age) but on the other hand, the book brings up some difficult questions about eugenics, morality, who should be institutionalized, corruption, power authority, religion, woman's rights, and racism . . . but only in the first half of the novel-- then it just gets beachier and beachier.