Summer Reading: Before We Were Yours

The next selection on my summer reading list, Before We Were Yours by Lisa Wingate, reminded me a great deal of a previous selection, The Orphan Train. They both shed light on a tragic and little known part of history involving the adoption of children during the Depression and they both employ a dual narrative with a contemporary story merging with one from the past. I enjoyed them both immensely! In the present day Avery Stafford, a former federal prosecutor from a wealthy and prominent South Carolina family, is being groomed to take her father's Senate seat. A chance meeting with May Weathers at a political event at a nursing home causes Avery to begin digging into her family's history. In 1939 Rill Floss lives with her family on a riverboat on the Mississippi River. When her mother goes into labor, her father leaves her in charge of her siblings to go to the hospital. The next morning the children are removed from the boat by a group of policemen who tell them they are going to visit their parents. Instead they are taken to an orphanage run by Georgia Tann for the Tennessee Children's Home Society. The children are mistreated and malnourished and Rill soon learns that they are meant to be adopted by families wealthy enough to pay Tann's outrageous fees. The two stories converge in a way that I was expecting but the predictability did not detract from my enjoyment of it. In fact, I found the resolution to be incredibly emotional. Rill's story, based on the real-life experiences of hundreds of children who were victims of Georgia Tann's illegal adoption for profit scheme, is incredibly compelling and my heart broke for these children who were at the mercy of such evil people while their biological parents who, because of their poverty and lack of education, were powerless to intervene. Avery's story is also interesting because she is fighting against her family's expectations of her and against the social conventions of her class (although I did think that the romance was really cheesy and not needed to advance the plot). The characters come alive off of the page and I spent several nights reading well into the morning to find out what happens to them. I highly recommend this novel!

Note:  Have you read Before We Were Yours?  What did you think?