Book Review: Before We Were Yours

When my friend, Jackie, took a DNA test through Ancestry.com for fun, she was expecting confirmation of her Polish roots. When the results came back, she presented the information to extended family and after 50 years of silence, they broke their vow to her deceased parents and informed her that she had been adopted. She has since found her birth mother and is grateful for the way things turned out. Jackie was adopted as an infant and thus had no memories of her original family. But what if she had been literally stolen from her birth parents in order for others to profit through the adoption process? That is the true story behind the fictional account in Lisa Wingate's novel, Before We Were Yours.

Twelve-year-old Rill Foss is very protective of her four younger siblings. Her mother, expecting twins, is rushed to the hospital one night and Rill is left in charge. The children are scooped up by men they assume are with the police and taken to an orphanage. Rill is devastated when, one by one, her siblings are snatched away (the most resistant one merely disappears, the youngest boy and girl are adopted out, and only Rill and her sister Fern are left in the despicable orphanage until a composer and his infertile wife adopt both of them).

In present day, Aiken, South Carolina, Avery Stafford encounters a woman in a nursing home who snatches her dragonfly bracelet, convinced that it belongs to her. As Avery digs into the mysterious connection, she unearths long-hidden truths about her family history. Her attraction to Trent Turner, the man assisting her in the search, makes her question her relationship with her fiance, Elliot.

The book does an outstanding job of presenting a very complicated historical tragedy. The reader is sucked into the tension between what works out for the best and is yet a despicable travesty of justice. Georgia Tann is apparently a well-known woman in the adoption movement. She did much to remove the stigma surrounding adoption, but she also ran homes where abuse was rampant and children were basically stolen from their poor parents to be placed in wealthier homes so that Tann could profit from the transaction.

In the author's note at the end, Wingate provides a bibliography of books devoted to the subject of Georgia Tann and the infamous Tennessee Children's Home Society. She acknowledges the blend of fact and fiction in her story and ends with this insightful comment about the children of adoption:

"If there is one overarching lesson to be learned from the Foss children and from the true-life story of the Tennessee Children's Home Society, it is that babies and children, no matter what corner of the world they hail from, are not commodities ... they are human beings with histories, and needs, and hopes, and dreams of their own."