Before We Were Yours

Before We Were Yours  by Lisa Wingate 352 pages

Warning: Don’t start this novel unless you have plenty of time to read because you won’t be able to stop reading.

Wingate has taken a footnote from history and turned into a page-turner. The reality of the story is Georgia Tann and her Tennessee Children’s Home Society. On the outside, the home appears to be just like any of the other orphanages that are common in 1930s America. But Tann had a  dirty secret. She stole children from rural, poverty-stricken areas, then sold them to wealthy clients, charging absorbent fees and treating the children as if they were a piece of garbage.

Based on this solid fact and careful research, Wingate creates a Mississippi River family whose home is a shantyboat named the Arcadia in 1936. The Great Depression is raging across America, so life on the river isn’t so bad…at least they always have something to eat.

The five children and their parents, Briny and Queenie, lead a wanderer’s existence, traveling up and down the river. The kids get schooling here and there, but they seem to always be on the move to where the fishing is better and the weather is warmer. When Queenie goes into labor and a river midwife can’t help her deliver, Briny is forced to leave the boat and take his wife to a Memphis hospital. Twelve-year-old Rill is left to care for the boat and her four siblings.

The parents have been gone a couple of days when strangers passing as the law come to collect the children, telling them they only be staying at the Tennessee Children’s Home Society until their parents can come and collect them. The abuse they endure at the hands of Tann and her minions are criminal.

Then flash forward to contemporary time. Avery Stafford and her father, Senator Stafford, have returned to South Carolina for the Senator’s health issues.  Avery is being groomed to take his place in the Senate, following in her father’s and grandfather’s footsteps. But it’s a chance meeting with an elderly woman during a nursing home photo opp, that changes her life forever.

The encounter compels Avery to dig through her family’s history to try to determine what the elderly woman and her dementia-addled grandmother have in common.

Waving between past and present, this is the story of how one family’s past has shaped its present. A highly compulsive read, the characters are complex and well-drawn. Before We Were Yours receives 6 out of 5 stars in Julie’s world.