Book reviews

---

    Editor’s Note: Reviewing a book is a perilous adventure since we all have our own notions of what makes a book endearing, powerful and memorable. 

      Against my better judgement, I  will share my thoughts in this and future newsletters on books I have enjoyed over the years. Chances are you will have a distinctly different take on them than I do. But then, that’s what makes book discussions so much fun. So, if you have insights or opinions on the books, please feel free to share them with me at cascadefriends47@gmail.com.               --Joe David

      Before We Were Yours follows an increasingly familiar formula in modern storytelling, with one story taking place in the past and another in the present, with the two deeply interdependent upon one another. It is a historical novel that delves into a sinister practice at the end of the Great Depression: the kidnapping of young children to put up for adoption for profit.

      Rill Foss is the interlocutor of the story from the past. She is the oldest of five siblings who live a simple life in 1939 as riverboat nomads with their parents, Queenie and Briny. When Queenie suffers a difficult birthing process and Briny takes her to the hospital, the children are kidnapped by Georgia Tann—a real life villain of the time--and put into the Tennessee Children’s Home Society Orphanage. 

      The Fosses are a fictitious family that the author uses to emotionally convey the tragedy and trauma of real families that were victimized by Tann and her cohorts in the mid-20th century. 

      One of Fern's sisters, Camelia, gets killed in the orphanage while Lark, Fern and her brother, Gabion, are placed. Later on, as adults, they are reunited by the efforts of the grown-up version of a young boy Rill had protected in the orphanage. 

      In the present, the story is being told by Avery Shepard, the daughter of a senator and the descendant of a long line of blue bloods. She is living the life her parents have laid out for her and comes to realize, in the course of her pursuit of the truth about her family’s history, that that’s not what she wants. 

      Her Grandma, Betty, is in a senior care facility suffering from dementia, and Avery comes to learn, after a long investigation, that Betty is actually the fifth of the Foss children who was born on the night the other children were abducted. 

      The character development is rich and layered, and, if you’re like me, you feel as though you’re going to miss them at the conclusion of the story. The themes are plentiful and well-developed. The randomness of class distinctions is a strong theme. The incredible strength of family ties and, in particular, sisterly ties is another. The ubiquitous Southern-style racism of the times rears its ugly head.

      This is an incredibly well conceived and written story, and I believe it came even more to life for me because I listened to it as an audiobook and the readers were very effective in creating the characters and the emotional effects of what they had to endure.

RETURN TO LIST OF ARTICLES