{"id":1006,"date":"2018-12-31T15:13:28","date_gmt":"2018-12-31T15:13:28","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/wordpress.etypegoogle10.com\/?p=1006"},"modified":"2018-12-31T15:13:28","modified_gmt":"2018-12-31T15:13:28","slug":"glenn-dromgooles-texas-reads-column-appears-weekly-at-lonestarliterary-com-65","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/wordpress.etypegoogle10.com\/?p=1006","title":{"rendered":"Glenn Dromgoole’s Texas Reads column appears weekly at LoneStarLiterary.com"},"content":{"rendered":"
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<\/span><\/span>Texas Reads<\/span>>> archive<\/span><\/a><\/span>Glenn Dromgoole<\/span><\/h1>\n

7.23.2017\u00a0\u00a0 Wingate novel based on children\u2019s home scandal<\/h1>\n

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<\/a><\/span><\/span>Lisa Wingate\u2019s new mainstream novel,<\/span> Before We Were Yours<\/span><\/a><\/span> (Ballantine Books, $26 hardcover), is a troubling, powerful story that revolves around a children\u2019s home in Tennessee that kidnapped poor children, abused them, and sold them to rich families for a huge profit.<\/p>\n

The story is fiction, but the children\u2019s home was not. Georgia Tann ran the Tennessee Children\u2019s Home Society in Memphis from the 1920s until the scandal was fully investigated in the early 1950s. You can get more information about the home by Googling her name.<\/p>\n

Two main characters narrate the novel, which alternates between present-day Aiken, S.C., and the Memphis children\u2019s home in 1939. Avery Stafford, daughter of a U.S. senator, is considering running for her father\u2019s Senate seat if he decides to retire or if his cancer gets worse. An assistant U.S. attorney, Avery has gone back to South Carolina to establish residency just in case. And to get better acquainted with the political landscape there.<\/p>\n

On a meet-and-greet visit at a retirement home, Avery encounters a woman whose story will change everything. Avery wonders if the woman and her own ailing grandmother have some common bond, and that sets her on a quest to find out more about her own family. Meanwhile, the story jumps back to 1939 and a family of five children who are abducted from their riverboat shanty and taken to the Memphis orphanage where they are held captive in deplorable conditions.<\/p>\n

The story shifts back and forth from Avery Stafford to twelve-year-old Rill Foss, who is trying to keep her siblings together in hopes that their father will rescue them.<\/p>\n

I\u2019ve read most of Lisa Wingate\u2019s twenty-plus novels over the past fifteen years, and I think this is her best yet. She has received high praises from other reviewers as well:<\/p>\n