Before We Were Yours

Before We Were Yours is a novel by the American writer Lisa Wingate, published in 2016. It is inspired by a true story, and it runs two timelines that are joined by the same injustice.

In Memphis in 1939, twelve-year-old Rill Foss and her four younger brothers and sisters live aboard their family's shantyboat on the Mississippi River. When their father has to rush their mother to hospital on a stormy night, Rill is left in charge, and strangers arrive in force. The children are taken to a Tennessee Children's Home Society orphanage and told that they will soon be returned to their parents.

They are not. Rill fights to keep her sisters and brother together in a place run by a director who is cruel and who has other plans for them. Generations later, in Aiken, South Carolina, another family is still living with the consequences of what was done to the Foss children, and the two stories come together as the present-day characters work out where they come from.