Before We Were Yours

by Lisa Wingate ★★★★☆

Avery Stafford is the daughter of a prominent U.S. Senator, Wells Stafford, who has been summoned home for the summer to be closer to him after a recent (and unbeknownst to the public) colon cancer diagnosis. She's also being prepped as a possible successor for the U.S. Senate if her father's health deteriorates (or worse). While supporting her father at a photo op at a local nursing home, one of the residents approaches Avery, grasps her wrist, and stares at her with apparent familiarity, seemingly mistaking Avery for someone from the woman's past. It is not until Avery gets home that she realizes that the woman has detached and taken the dragonfly bracelet from Avery's wrist, an heirloom given to her by her grandmother.

This encounter launches a dual storyline novel in which modern-day Avery tries to uncover potential secrets about her family's past, while in parallel we trace the turbulent childhood of the older woman, who along with her siblings was snatched from their shantyboat near Memphis as children and taken to the Tennessee Children's Home Society in 1939. While Before We Were Yours is fiction, the Tennessee Children's Home Society was a real institution in Memphis, led by a woman named Georgia Tann who is also portrayed in the book. To the outside world, the Tennessee Children's Home Society appeared to be an upstanding organization, and "to the general public, Tann was simply a matronly, well-meaning woman who devoted her life to rescuing children in need." The reality was much more harsh: Tann regularly used underhanded tactics to deceive poor and uneducated parents into signing over custody of their children, or in extreme cases told them their healthy children had died shortly after childbirth while secretly spiriting them away to a wealthy family who was willing to pay top dollar for a young baby.

Our young narrator in the 1939 timeline, Rill Foss, recounts her time in the Tennessee Children's Home Society, while Avery grows closer to understanding the connection between her powerful Southern family and the disturbing facts of what happened for decades in Memphis. It's a respectable premise for a novel, but it also felt somewhat forced. The children's story is sad and tragic, and while I appreciate the construct author Wingate used to shed light on the real-life atrocities of the Tennessee Children's Home Society, I can't help but think that the novel could have been more compelling if it focused solely on the past. Instead, the mild drama in the present day felt mostly manufactured and superficial, especially in comparison to the true life tragedy detailed in the past.

Given the high average reviews, I think I came into this one with overinflated expectations, and it failed to fully live up to those. It was still a better-than-average novel, but I wanted it to be great, and it wasn't.