Redheaded Reviews: Before We Were Yours by Lisa Wingate

This book is split up alternating between two people's stories: Avery Stafford in present-day Aiken, South Carolina who left her job as a federal prosecutor in Maryland to help her sick dad with his job as a Senator just in case he needs to step down she can take his place and May Weathers Cranford/Rill Foss who grew up on the Mississippi River in 1939 but was kidnapped with her three sisters and one brother and sent to an orphanage in Memphis while her parents were at the hospital having a difficult birth with twins.

A chance encounter at a party at a senior care center Avery meets May who notices that Avery looks just like Fern, her sister. May accidentally takes Avery's dragonfly bracelet which had belonged to her grandmother. Avery's grandmother is suffering from dementia and is in a home herself. When Avery goes back to get the bracelet she stops to talk to May and finds an old photograph of a couple in her room of a woman that looks just like her grandmother and herself. But May isn't giving up any of her secrets today. Avery, however, does snap a picture of the picture.

When she goes and sees her grandmother she asks if she knows May and her grandmother avoids the question. When she shows her the picture she says the word "Queenie" and becomes a bit panicked and says that they can't know about Arcadia. So, Avery goes hunting in her grandmother's house inside her old day planners and finds a clue. A notation to call a Trent Turner in Edisto where she has a home that the family use to get away at.

Avery calls the number and tries to get information out of Trent Turner's grandson, Trent, who says that his grandfather left something for her grandmother but her grandmother has to come and pick it up. When an opening comes up in the busy schedule she takes it to go off to visit the house in Edisto where Trent is and convinces him to turn over the envelope which contains a boy's birth certificate. The two of them decide to investigate further inside his grandfather's outbuilding where he did his finding people side business. While there they find a picture of four women on the beach together wearing dragonfly bracelets and one of them is her grandmother and one of them is May. They all bear a resemblance to each other.

Trent explains that the work his grandfather did was for certain people like himself who were victims of the Tennessee Children's Home Society. It was run by Georgia Tann and she stole children off of the road or conned poor parents out of signing over their children to her. These children were put into deplorable orphanages and then perhaps adopted to rich couples, such as actresses June Alison and Joan Crawford. Brothers and sisters were separated. Children were killed or disappeared never to be seen again. Some were molested. She had politicians, police, and social workers in her pocket. She worked from the 1920s to 1950 when she died. That's when everything came out. But the records were sealed until 1995. But kids, when they grew up, hired detectives, like Trent's grandfather to hunt down lost family members.

As Avery is questioning the life that seems mapped out for her including a readily made fiance that she has known since birth, May's story unfolds from her life on the river to live in the orphanage trying to save her brother and sisters and find a way back home to her parents. This is an incredible and powerful book and hard to imagine it happening except that it did. The author based the things that happened to May and her siblings on things recounted by survivors. I really loved this book. This book is truly a must read.

*For those that need to know. While the character of Mr. Riggs is a child molester in the book he is referred to as one who messes with kids and that is all. No scenes of molestation are described in this book.

Quotes

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.

-Lisa Wingate (Before We Were Yours p 180)

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.

-Lisa Wingate (Before We Were Yours p 315)

A woman’s past need not predict her future. She can dance to new music if she chooses. Her own music. To hear the tune, she must only stop talking. To herself, I mean. We’re always trying to persuade ourselves of things.

-Lisa Wingate (Before We Were Yours p 317)