Review: Before We Were Yours
A couple of weeks ago, I read Lisa Wingate’s novel Before We Were Yours, and ever since I’ve felt the need to recommend this gut-wrenching novel to you, my fellow Wenches. I feel the story is important enough that everyone should have a chance to read it.
If you’re intrigued, let me tell you more, and I’ll try to avoid spoilers.
Before We Were Yours is a story about children taken from their parents through kidnapping or subterfuge and then placed for adoption — for a price. It is based on the real-life tale of Georgia Tann, who operated the Tennessee Children’s Home Society, an adoption agency in Memphis, Tennessee, from 1920 to 1950. Tann ran the agency as a front for an illegal network that engaged in mass kidnapping and trafficking of southern children. She used brute force, deception, and threats to steal children from poor families and single mothers. Then she sold them to wealthy parents, and also dabbled in a bit of extortion when opportunity presented itself. Fair-skinned, blonde children were especially prized and lucrative.
“Though Rill and her siblings exist only in these pages, their experiences mirror those reported by children who were taken from their families from the 1920s through 1950.” ~ Notes from the author
The story is told from two points of view.
The first occurs in the present day and belongs to Avery Stafford, the daughter of a wealthy politician from South Carolina. Avery works with her father and is being groomed to take his place. She stumbles onto some interesting and disturbing discoveries that connect her family to the family of another, unfamiliar character.
The second occurs in the past (beginning in 1939) and belongs to Rill, a 12-year-old girl who lives in a boat on a river near Memphis, Tennessee, and helps care for her four younger siblings. Life is not easy, but Rill’s parents are good people, doing their best for their kids.
While Rill’s mother and father are at the hospital awaiting the birth of a new baby, Rill and her siblings are taken by people calling themselves policemen to an orphanage that happens to be Georgia Tann’s terrible establishment.
The book alternates between Rill’s and Avery’s stories.
“I drop her on the cot and turn away and grab my hair and pull until it hurts. I want to pull all of it out. Every single piece. I want a pain I understand instead of the one I don’t. I want a pain that has a beginning and an end, not one that goes on forever and cuts all the way to the bone.”Both stories are compelling. One digs into the past while the other looks to an unknown future. Both stories unravel slowly until they come together.
“What the mind don’t ’member, the heart still know. Love, the strongest thing of all. Stronger than all the rest.”I think that author Liza Wingate did a beautiful job of writing a harsh story very tenderly. Both Avery and Rill have a clear, strong voice that captivated me from the start. Yes, it’s a heartbreaking story, but also a powerful tale of courage, hope, and love. It’s a must read, in my humble opinion.
“Life is not unlike cinema. Each scene has its own music, and the music is created for the scene, woven to it in ways we do not understand. No matter how much we may love the melody of a bygone day or imagine the song of a future one, we must dance within the music of today, or we will always be out of step, stumbling around in something that doesn’t suit the moment. I let go of the river’s song.”
This Wench rates Before We Were Yours:
You are so right! I read this book when you recommended it to me last month, and I loved it! The story was riveting, and I thought it had an outstanding sense of time and place. The descriptions of life along the rivers in the deep South during the 1940s were marvelous.
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