Book Blurb:
The publication of Lisa Wingate’s novel Before We Were Yours brought new awareness of Tann’s lucrative career in child trafficking. Adoptees who knew little about their pasts gained insight into the startling facts behind their family histories. Encouraged by their contact with Wingate and award-winning journalist Judy Christie, who documented the stories of fifteen adoptees in this book, many determined Tann survivors set out to trace their roots and find their birth families. Before and After includes moving and sometimes shocking accounts of the ways in which adoptees were separated from their first families. Often raised as only children, many have joyfully reunited with siblings in the final decades of their lives. Christie and Wingate tell of first meetings that are all the sweeter and more intense for time missed and of families from very different social backgrounds reaching out to embrace better-late-than-never brothers, sisters, and cousins. In a poignant culmination of art meeting life, many of the long-silent victims of the tragically corrupt system return to Memphis with the authors to reclaim their stories at a Tennessee Children’s Home Society reunion
forms, her gentle, constant faith changes the course of his life.
My Review: 4 stars
Before and After isn’t a fictionalized follow up to the best-selling book Before We Were Yours, it’s actually real-life accounts of children from the Tennessee Children’s Home. I loved Before We Were Yours and discussed this with several book clubs. You all know that any book in which I learn something new will always stick with me. The make-believe characters in that book still haunt me today. After the release of that book in 2017, many children who’d been adopted from Tennessee began searching for biological parents and siblings.
That’s where this book comes in. Wingate, along with journalist Judy Christie, created a non-fiction account of the many survivors, reunions and stories from the Tennessee Children’s Home. My heart broke all over again for the many infants that died in Tann’s care and of course, the complete lack of honesty and compassion the children lived with. To foil that, we were also privy to stories of families being reunited and how they found one another. This book made me cry for the injustices and weep in joy for those that found family or birth parents.
Once again, I found myself googling more about Georgia Tann and her corrupt organization. In my discussions with the handful of book groups I facilitate, many brought up relatives or friends that knew they were adopted out of Tennessee. I imagined if all the book clubs in the country that discussed this book provoked stories of adoptees coming from Tennessee, certainly paths would cross through word of mouth. Reading has power and Wingate should be proud that both her first and second book was, and will continue to be, an impetus for adopted children to learn more about their Tennessee connections.
Note: I recommend reading Before We Were Yours first. I think this new book is a wonderful companion to the first, but not necessarily a stand alone.
Quotes I liked:
Parents were permitted to return a child like a piece of clothing that did not fit.”
“How does someone choose to prey on the most vulnerable? Go against all the instincts we have to protect children and market them like products? How does a community turn a blind eye?”
“Tann’s empire at the Tennessee Children’s Home Society has been built with a combustible blend of desperate pregnant women, shattered children, vulnerable poverty-stricken families, eager adoptive parents, powerful politicians, ego, and greed.”
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