Before We Were Yours by Lisa Wingate

I had a hard time with this one!!  Not your typical historical fiction, even though the bookseller told me it was the best HF novel to come out all year.

This is well written, split between two time frames, and yes, historical fiction grounded in truth.  There really was a Tennessee Children's Home Society and there really was a Ms. Georgia Tann.  What she did to families in the decades she ran that "home", and how those children were treated, is a blight in American history for sure.

Here, Wingate brings to life one fictional family destroyed by the deception of Tann.  When mother Queenie is taken to the hospital during a life threatening delivery of twins, she and her husband leave their other five children on their river boat and tell them to stay together.  Hours later, representatives from the children's home show up and take the kids - planning to "auction" them off, and appreciative of their blond curls - they will bring in higher bids.

I found this a difficult read.  I was terrified of child abuse, which I just cannot read about.  It was heartbreaking, even in the anticipation of whether or not it would happen.  These kids are beaten, harshly treated, and starved before being sold off to the highest bidder.  Most of the parents are conned into signing adoption papers and they have no idea they've just signed away their parental rights.  It happened, and it made me sick.  But for the main characters, there is a happy ending, rest assured.  It is just not the ending that their beginning foretold.

The alternating chapters set in the current day helped alleviate my stress though. The story of Avery Stafford, federal prosecutor and daughter of a Senator with an eye for his seat when he retires, is a good one.  She stumbles on some half information which leads her on a secret search to learn the truth about her grandmother's life.  And it totally changes her own.  Nature or nurture??  That is the question.

IF you liked Orphan Train, this book is in the same vein, so the story itself is truly fascinating.  That this sort of thing went on unchecked is unthinkable these days.  But it did, and it changed the course of history for many a child and many a family.  Records were destroyed and names were changed so that even when records were reopened decades later it was near impossible to trace lost loved ones.  Some remain a mystery here; some are solved.  Just like real life.  Wingate ends it well, with a few things left to wonder about.  Again, a tough read, but certainly well done.

And for once, I LOVED the cover.  Very appropriate for the story.