Before We Were Yours by Lisa Wingate

The cover of this book is basically everything I really don't want to see in a book. Two small girls, one holding a battered stuffed animal, sitting on a dock, potentially ready to either jump in or be pushed into the water.  But Before We Were Yours by Lisa Wingate was on the list that I looked at of recommended books by librarians, so I went ahead and put it on my hold list at the library.

This novel tells the story of a happy family that lived on a riverboat and how that happy family was torn apart one night by a storm and strangers who kidnap the children and place them in an orphanage where they are individually taken away from each other. Two generations later, the granddaughter of one of the original "orphans" begins unraveling the mystery of her family's past.  It's based on the true story of Georgia Tann, the operator of the Tennessee Children's Home Society, an orphanage that was the front for child trafficking from the 1920s through until it closed in 1950. Tann was guilt of coercing poor, mostly single parents to sign away their parental rights, kidnapping, blackmail, and murder. Many of the children who entered the orphanage ended up missing. This book elegantly weaves all these horrifying details into the narrative.

It was good, it really was. The narrative structure was clear, the language was beautiful, and the topic was super interesting. But it just didn't grab me. I kept putting it off to read later until it was three days overdue at the library and I just had to finish it. As I'm trying to put my finger on exactly what it was about the story that made it less than a home run for me, it was basically that the adult granddaughter who was our main modern-day narrator was just a dud. She was boring.  We knew she had attachments to her father and grandmother, but it seemed dutiful to me.  She had a boring relationship with her fiance, which the author tried to fix with a seemingly last minute romantic interest, but that romantic interest just made the narrator seem flighty.  Anyway, I didn't enjoy hanging out with her and so I just stopped reading the book whenever I would come to her chapters.

I think it's worth reading, but I'm not going to give it a gold star any time soon.