Throughout history children have often been abused and killed at the hands of adults who should be there to help and support them. This novel brings us back to the 1930’s through the present following a fictional family and the horrific historical incidents surrounding an orphanage. Evil is interlaced with goodness as we see this gracefully told story unfold.

Lisa Wingate takes us back to 1939 on the Mississippi River in “Before We Were Yours.” Parents, Queenie and Briny have five children.  Queenie is pregnant with twins and can’t deliver the babies with a midwife.  Briny makes the decision to leave with Queenie to take her to a hospital.  What happens after that is such a miscarriage of justice that it’s hard to imagine that this actually happened to children in America. 

Wingate drew from the infamous Georgia Tann and her wretched Tennessee Children’s Home Society in Memphis.

Queenie and Briny’s high-spirited children left on a boat in the Mississippi River while their parents leave for the hospital. They are quite poor without any resources. Rill, Camiella, Lark, Fern and Gabion are taken by the police and put into the Tennessee Children’s Home. 

Fast forward to the present, Avery Stafford, a young lawyer, working with her father’s senatorial campaign has a chance encounter with May Crandall at a nursing home, her father happens to be speaking at.  This meeting set into motion a chain of events that would change all their lives forever.

This book has to be read without a lot of information given out beforehand. Wingate wrote a story with a lot of small moments that all become one large one and the reader should see it unfold the way it’s supposed to.

Our book club loved this book.  It’s quite sad at parts, and we may have glossed over a few things we felt too bad about. The book manages to end on a high note, but it stayed with me for days. I can’t fathom hurting a child.  It goes so against everything I believe in.

We talked about the children and the how their lives unfolded. Also, about the other children that no one seems to know about. So many of them were never found. We talked about motherhood and what that really means – biological and adoptive.

Every book club should read this book.

(There are quite a few non-fiction books on the subject that Wingate offers at the end of her novel if you want to continue reading on this subject.)

Enjoy.

Rating: 9 fffffffff