Before We Were Yours

After reading Lisa Wingate's powerful novel based on a scandalous American adoption racket, I'd say the actual Georgia Tann must be doing a lot of explaining in the afterlife to justify her actions.  Before We Were Yours (#724) is fiction, but the five Foss children who were legally stolen away from their parents in the late 1930s are an amalgamation of documented cases of abuse, cruelty, and the most powerful motivator of all, the profit Tann turned from large sums of money for healthy children paid by desperate adoptive parents.


Rill Foss does her best to keep her siblings together after the police come to their Mississippi riverboat shanty moored near Memphis.  They claim to be taking the children to see their parents at the hospital in Memphis, but it soon becomes obvious that it is a lie.  Mistreated, starved and in real physical danger, the most appealing children vanish after "showing parties".  The unappealing and unwanted ones simply disappear. Rill struggles desperately to do what is best for her sisters and brother even if it means separation.


In the present day Avery Stafford has returned home to South Carolina from a promising career as a federal prosecutor in Baltimore.  She is being groomed to carry on her father's work in Congress  A chance encounter at a nursing home appearance with her father's campaign leads to some unsettling questions when the old woman claims to know her Grandma Judy.  No one else in the family seems to know anything about May Crandall, but the more Avery looks into it, the more she thinks May's claim maybe real.  The one thing the Stafford family cannot afford is a secret which could be used by the opposition party against her father.  Better that Avery finds the truth on her own.


In telling this horrific tale, Ms. Wingate has given the reader empathetic characters in Rill and Avery.  Everyone was exploited here; children, prospective parents, biological parents; it's difficult to know whose plight was the worst.  Since Before We Were Yours is a work of fiction, in the case of Rill Foss, she was able to create a happy ending, but for almost all of Georgia Tann's victims, this was not the case.  The only good that seems to have come out of the whole sorry mess is that her work did much to remove the stigma of adoption in the American public's eyes.  But then one must ask the question, was all the suffering worth it?  This novel makes you think about that.


I realize it's been a long time since I've said anything a book's cover, but I did think the composite photo cover on Before We Were Yours captured a moment in this book so perfectly I had to comment on it.  If you've read the book, you've probably had the same moment of recognition.  Kudos to the designer for perfectly embodying the bond of sisterhood.