Here I am in chemo again, reading my book. 😉
I love the cover, as the emotion is so evident in the lives of these children. I envision Rill on the left, who felt totally responsible for taking care of her siblings.
Before We Were Yours by Lisa Wingate was selected for our April book club. This one was much better than the last one, but it was still a difficult and sad story to read. The story is based on a real place called the Tennessee Children’s Home Society, whose owner Georgia Tann tricked families into giving their children up for adoption (and even stole babies who were born) so she could traffic them and make money. She made a lot of pretenses about helping the children and taking good care of them, and wealthy celebrities supported her endeavors, but the book reveals the truth about the woman and her place through the eyes of some (fictitious) children who lived through it.
The shanty boat families were intriguing. Families who could not afford proper housing lived on a house boat on the Mississippi River. They kept to themselves, to avoid problems with the law. The main family that was followed in this story loved living on the river, and the children didn’t have any inclination that they were disadvantaged. They fished for food, and rowed into town for other necessities. When their mother was in the hospital giving birth to twins, Rill and her four siblings were taken away and placed in the Tennessee Children’s Home Society; their one piece of comfort was dreaming of the day they would go get to go back to the shanty boat and live with their parents. While this family is fictitious, there are pictures of shanty boat families in the book that I would imagine this family to resemble.
The story doesn’t begin there. It’s another novel that goes back and forth in time (we seem to be reading a lot of those lately). In the present day, Avery Stafford is with her Senator father attending a lady’s 100th birthday celebration at the nursing home where her high society grandmother now lives. A new resident at the home named May Crandall comes up to her and grabs her by the arm, and calls her “Fern.” Although a bit startled, she is intrigued. This event leads her down a path to solve a mystery, especially when she follows May to her room and sees a picture of May and her own grandmother on a table in May’s room. The book really takes off toward the second half, as Avery is learning about her grandmother’s hidden past, while learning about her own heritage in the process.
I shared a personal foster story with my book club, based on one of the questions in the book. There were a set of boys at the orphanage, who reminded me of my foster brother Jerry Meyers. He lived with us for two years from the time starting when he was 11, the same age as my brother Shawn. I was 7. If you were friends of my family back in the late 60s early 70s, you may remember Jerry. The boys in the book’s orphanage were incorrigible, as was Jerry, and older boys were rarely adopted. They felt unloved, and therefore acted unloving toward others. Jerry had been tossed back and forth from one foster home to another so he never learned how to love or trust his family. My mother made it her mission to love Jerry with the unconditional love of Jesus, and he had a radical transformation under her care. After two years his father (who had basically disowned him) decided to take him back. Why not, he was much better now. We saw him once more when he turned 18 and sought out my mother, but then we completely lost touch with him after that. I often wonder what happened to Jerry.
Anyway, the book was very good. It touched on a lot of emotions. It was a hard story to read, but an important piece of history. We discussed human trafficking, and how it still happens today. It’s just harder to put a name or face to the perpetrators in our day. Somehow Georgia Tann got away with this for three decades, but she died from cancer before the investigation could result in a conviction. I wonder how many others are getting away with this today because people are desperate to adopt a child, and they put their faith in an entity that they know little about. Definitely food for thought.
On a lighter note, it has been two years since they started the book club at the Canopy, and thus it was time for a celebration. the Canopy provides a variety of support services to cancer survivors (and warriors), all for free. They also sponsor my Spanish class. Click the link if you or a friend want to know more about how to get involved in the Canopy.
Here is our fearless leader’s synopsis of our time together.
Eight of us gathered to celebrate our second anniversary of the Canopy Book Club.  We all liked the book and thought it was an easy read and some of us would read it again!!!! Especially since the names of the children had changed at the Tennessee Children’s Home Society by the terrible Georgia Tann.  We all couldn’t believe that a Memphis woman could cause so much pain, death and child trafficking and people went along with it for decades.  We discussed how Rill/May and her siblings were so poor on the Arcadia but were so loved by Queenie and Briny and they never forgot it. We discussed how the sisters kept their history to themselves rather than sharing it with their families. Â
One woman shared a family secret that she found out through researching her genealogy but kept it to herself. Â We talked about adoption and another member shared the journey of both her children who have adopted children and how different the birth mother’s stories were. Â This was such a sad and heartbreaking story but we all thought it needed to be told.
We rated the book 8.4.
À la prochaine…hasta la próxima vez…until next time!