At a Glance
- Genre: Historical fiction
- Setting: 1939 Memphis and the Mississippi River shantyboats; present-day South Carolina Lowcountry
- Perspective: Dual-timeline, alternating viewpoints between a stolen child (Rill/May) and a modern investigator (Avery)
- Inspired by: The real Tennessee Children’s Home Society scandal
Opening Hook
A dragonfly bracelet slips onto a stranger’s wrist, and with it, a name long buried rises to the surface. On the river, a girl promises her father she’ll “keep care of everybody,” not knowing the world is about to tear her family apart. Decades later, a woman raised for public life trips over a private truth her family never intended to face. Before We Were Yours braids these lives together, asking what we owe to the past—and what freedom costs when truth finally comes due.
Plot Overview
1939: The River and the Orphanage
On a Mississippi shantyboat, twelve-year-old Rill Foss (May Crandall) keeps watch over her younger siblings while their mother, Queenie Foss, labors through a dangerous childbirth. Their father, Briny Foss, ferries Queenie to a Memphis hospital. In that vulnerable gap, strangers seize the children and deliver them to the Tennessee Children’s Home Society, ruled by the calculating Georgia Tann.
Renamed May, Rill fights to keep her family intact—even as the orphanage traffics them to wealthy adopters and scrubs away their identities. Her sister Camellia Foss rebels and pays a terrible price. Rill clings to her promise to Briny, but the system is a machine built to separate. Adoption brings physical safety yet seals a lifetime of unanswered questions, grief, and a vow never to forget who she was.
Present Day: The Bracelet and the Secret
In South Carolina, Avery Stafford returns home to bolster her prominent political family during her father’s health scare. At a nursing home photo op, an elderly resident—May Crandall—grips Avery’s dragonfly bracelet and calls her “Fern,” a name that hits with the force of a memory Avery doesn’t have. The moment unsettles her polished life.
Pulling on the thread, Avery uncovers buried links between her grandmother, Judy Stafford (Fern Foss), and Georgia Tann’s notorious operation. Her search strains her engagement and alarms her family, who fear scandal more than truth. Still, Avery pursues the story to its end.
Convergence: Sisters Reunited and a Choice Made
Avery confirms that Judy is Fern Foss—one of the stolen river children—and that the bracelet once bound two sisters across time. She arranges a tender reunion between the elderly May (Rill) and Judy (Fern), closing a wound that has ached for more than seventy years. Choosing candor over optics, Avery reimagines her future around truth, not image. For a deeper walkthrough of every turn, see the Full Book Summary.
Central Characters
For a broader cast list, visit the Character Overview.
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Rill Foss (May Crandall): The novel’s beating heart. Forced into leadership at twelve, Rill balances grit with tenderness as she tries to shield her siblings and preserve their names. As May, she carries the past quietly, knowing memory is both burden and bridge.
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Avery Stafford: Groomed for power, Avery begins as the perfect political daughter. Investigating May’s past breaks her orbit, turning her toward a life ordered by justice, not appearances.
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Queenie Foss: A loving, exhausted mother whose dangerous delivery opens the door to catastrophe. Her absence is the novel’s first devastating fracture.
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Briny Foss: A river father who loves fiercely but cannot outrow a corrupt system. His charge to Rill—protect the others—haunts and shapes her into adulthood.
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Camellia Foss: A spirited sister who resists control at every turn. Her fate underscores the costs of exploitation and the thin line between defiance and danger.
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Georgia Tann: The chilling architect of the Home Society’s machinery. She weaponizes law, class, and respectability to convert children into commodities.
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Judy Stafford (Fern Foss): Avery’s grandmother and a stolen child who built a new life under a new name. Her silence is survival; her recognition is grace.
Major Themes
For concise analyses of each motif, see the Theme Overview.
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The Enduring Power of Family Bonds: The novel argues that family is memory plus choice—what we remember and what we choose to honor. Rill’s vow, the dragonfly keepsake, and the late-life reunion show love persisting beyond time, distance, and even lost names.
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Secrets and Their Consequences: Secrets protect reputations but corrode relationships. The Staffords’ polished narrative looks intact until Avery discovers the seams; telling the truth costs them control but restores integrity.
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The Search for Identity and Truth: Rill fights to remain herself as the system renames her; Avery learns that identity without truth is performance. Both arcs insist that selfhood is reclaimed, not assigned.
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Corruption of Power and Exploitation of the Vulnerable: Tann’s scheme flourishes because class, law, and politics shield it. Wingate exposes how institutions can prey on poverty—and asks readers to see who is safest when rules are written by the powerful.
Literary Significance
Before We Were Yours matters because it marries intimate storytelling to public history. Wingate’s dual-timeline structure sustains suspense while humanizing a sprawling scandal, transforming statistics into faces readers cannot forget. The book broadened awareness of adoption abuses, sparked intergenerational conversations about secrecy and survival, and demonstrated how commercial fiction can carry moral weight without surrendering narrative momentum.
Historical Context
The novel anchors its fiction in the crimes of Georgia Tann, who ran the Memphis branch of the Tennessee Children’s Home Society (1924–1950).
- Methods: Coercion, forged paperwork, and legal sleight of hand targeted single mothers and poor families; many were told their babies had died.
- Conditions: Children were warehoused in unsafe, unlicensed homes where neglect and abuse were common; hundreds are believed to have died.
- Corruption: Tann operated under political protection, with judges and officials enabling fraudulent adoptions.
- Legacy: Exposed in 1950, the scandal prompted reforms to adoption law nationwide. Tann died before prosecution, leaving victims to piece together their histories.
Critical Reception
- Bestseller Status: A long-running fixture on the New York Times list, the novel sold millions worldwide and became a book-club staple.
- Awards and Praise: A Goodreads Choice Award winner, lauded for emotionally rich storytelling, deft structure, and careful research.
- Reader Response: For many, the novel was a first encounter with this history, inspiring further inquiry and personal reckonings; its most resonant lines are collected in Quotes.