“Before We Were Yours”

A Book Review

In this poignant novel, inspired by a true story two families, generations apart, are forever changed by a heartbreaking injustice.

Lisa Wingate’s depiction of the lives of the five Foss children was straightforward. In 1939 Queenie and Briny, poor but loving parents, and their five children lived in a shanty boat on the Mississippi River. Rill was a skinny awkward twelve-year-old girl and the oldest of the children.

Queenie and Briny were very young when Rill was born. Because of Queenie’s young age Rill and Queenie seemed more like sisters than parents. As a consequence, the children were never taught to call them Mama and Papa. They called their parents by their first names, Queenie and Briny. And that’s how I’ll refer to them in this story.

Right away the reader is introduced to the 1950’s scandal involving Georgia Tann’s Memphis Tennessee Children’s Home Society where children’s lives were irrevocably changed through the greed and corruption of the medical and legal system. Lisa Wingate, the author, uses Queenie and Briny’s plight to take their children from them.

Queenie had given birth to her five babies on a river shanty with no complications. But the sixth labor did not go as planned. A midwife was brought in, and after examining Queenie the midwife blurted out, “There…