Review: Before We Were Yours

Before We Were Yours by Lisa Wingate
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Before We Were Yours is a story that will come at you with gusts of sorrow and shock. You will have the wind knocked right out of you. Merciful moments of redemption are carried by the cyclone, as well, and you will cling to them, you will.

It is based on the real-life horrors of the Tennessee Children’s Home Association, which for decades, under the rule of child-trafficker Georgia Tann, kidnapped babies and children, abused them, and sold them off to wealthy families. Many did not live to tell their stories; Tann is often referred to as one of history’s most prolific serial killers.

It is a beautiful story of sisterhood, survival, family love, and family secrets. The characters we come to adore are torn apart in a great storm of good vs. evil. Yet, in these battles the unshakeable power of love endures all, and the towering capacity of the human mind to control its own anguish rises to the top.

I shush my mind because a mind can ruin you if you let it.

At times I wanted to kick something. Unkindness to children is hard to take, even with the comfortable distance that decades and a paperback can offer. But this author matches the brutality of the story with the indefatigable beauty of life, even life built on ruins.

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.”

When I read this quote above, the truth of it struck me hard. I searched for a piece of music to play and set this story to; then I finished reading the book, while listening. I chose Sergei Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto No. 2 in C Minor, Op. 18, because (to me) it matches majesty to grief measure for measure.

The pace of the story is superb. I could not put it down. While the subject material is sinister and the losses far too real, the author eventually gifts her reader with kinship and recovery. And true love, too.



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