Before We Were Yours

In 1939, aboard a shantyboat drifting the Mississippi near Memphis, twelve-year-old Rill Foss tends to her four younger siblings amid fireflies and her parents' bohemian songs—a fragile idyll shattered when Briny rushes Queenie to the hospital during a storm. Strangers descend; the children are seized and delivered to the Tennessee Children's Home Society, where promises of swift reunion curdle into brutality under Georgia Tann's regime. Wingate, drawing from exhaustive research into Tann's real-life network of kidnappings and black-market adoptions, renders this era with unflinching detail: the orphanage's cruelties—beatings, separations, coerced baptisms—pulse with a raw, documentary immediacy that elevates the novel beyond mere sentiment.

Alternating with Rill's ordeal is the contemporary thread of Avery Stafford, a polished attorney whose discovery of her grandmother's locket unlocks suppressed family secrets. Avery's genteel Southern world—marked by senatorial expectations and a fraying engagement—collides with the raw vitality of a nursing home resident named May Crandal, whose guarded mutterings hint at connections to the Foss children. This structure, a formal echo of memory's fragmentation, propels the narrative; Wingate deftly weaves the timelines, using objects like a faded photograph or a whispered name to suture past and present. The novel thus performs what it thematizes: the stubborn architecture of belonging, resilient against time's eroding tides.

Wingate's greatest formal achievement lies in her orchestration of voices; Rill's childlike dialect—'Camellia don't stink no more; she smell like store soap'—clashes vividly against Avery's clipped precision, underscoring class fractures and the mutability of identity. Thematically, the book probes privilege's blind spots: wealthy families buy innocence, while the poor pay in flesh. Yet this is no polemic; Wingate tempers outrage with uplift, as reunions flicker like river lights, affirming loyalty's quiet ferocity. The historical scaffolding grounds these explorations, transforming scandal into a lens on enduring human ties.

For all its structural ingenuity and topical urgency, Before We Were Yours stumbles in its prose; reviewers rightly note moments of stiffness, where narrative telling supplants showing—'Rill knew then that everything had changed forever' arrives as blunt exposition rather than earned revelation. Dialogues occasionally veer toward melodrama, siblings' pleas straining credulity amid the orphanage's calculated terror; the modern thread, meanwhile, leans on convenient serendipities that border on contrivance. These lapses—particularly in Wingate's rhythmic control—diminish the novel's otherwise potent emotional architecture, reminding us that historical weight alone cannot redeem stylistic infelicities.

Ultimately, Before We Were Yours succeeds as a testament to fiction's power to exhume injustices, urging contemporary readers to interrogate inherited silences. Its formal risks—dual narratives, dialectal shifts—pay dividends in thematic depth, even if the execution wavers. Wingate invites us not merely to witness suffering but to trace its echoes; in doing so, she crafts a novel that, for all its flaws, lingers like a half-remembered song from childhood's riverbank.