Recent Reviews
Before We Were Yours by Lisa Wingate
Based on the real life scandal at the Tennessee Children’s Home Society, Lisa Wingate’s heartbreaking novel is told from two different points of view. First we learn the traumatic story of the five Foss siblings who are taken from their shanty boat on the Mississippi River in 1939 and placed in the Tennessee Children’s Home Society in Memphis. The children’s mother and father leave to go to the hospital where their mother gives birth. Illiterate and under sedation, their mom unknowingly signs paperwork relinquishing her beloved children to the state.
When the Foss siblings first arrive at the orphanage in shock, the oldest Rill assures them that their parents’ will arrive soon to retrieve them. Yet it soon becomes clear that they are in a nightmare from which they cannot escape. Rill does everything she can to protect her younger siblings but soon her youngest brother Gabion is adopted and the four siblings never see him again. The tragedies continue to mount. The Foss siblings learn that they are all viewed as poor river rats. In time, Georgia Tann changes the children’s names and invents for each of them an impressive pedigree. It is hard to read about children being treated as nonhuman commodities by cruel adults who convince themselves that children are better off with wealthy parents than poor parents.
The other perspective of the story takes place in the present and follows Avery Stafford, a granddaughter of one of the Foss siblings. While Rill Foss’ story moves forward, Avery looks to the past to discover the hidden history of an elderly woman who is mysteriously connected to Avery’s grandmother.
Wingate captures the horror perpetuated by Georgia Tann and her enablers. Between 1939-1950, thousands of children were placed in Tann’s orphanages. Most of the children were neglected, abused, and traumatized by being ripped from their birth families. In 1951, there was a newspaper article “Adoption Matron May Have Been Most Prolific Serial Killer.” This horror show happened due to the greed and prejudice of George Tann and those she paid off. Even when the public became aware that children were stolen and treated cruelly, the Tennessee courts sealed the adoption records until 1995! Too many people must have been complicit and/or benefitted from one of Georgia Tann’s adoptions.
Though the present day part of the story is not as strong, it is a relief from the abuse. Avery Stafford does succeed in discovering her grandmother’s hidden past and connecting these two elderly Foss women. Though these women have lived happy and privileged lives far away from the river, their traumatic early years still dominate their emotional lives. The memories of their forced adoptions reside close to the surface. How could they not?
Though I wish Wingate had explored Georgia Tann’s early life and motivations for her disturbed view of the world, I believe her novel tells an important story of greed, collusion, and the systemic oppression of poor people. By creating characters with whom we can empathize, Wingate makes real the horrible events that occurred. She is both illuminating a sad story from the past and reminding her readers that powerful people can and will collude to advance their own immoral interests at the expense of those less powerful. Before We Were Yours is not an easy read and yet by the end of the book I felt buoyed by the resilience of the human sprit.
Little Nothing by Marisa Silver
When the wonderful leader of my disability book group selected Little Nothing by Marisa Silver, I expected to read about the trials and tribulations of a young girl born a dwarf. Yet after the first few chapters, it became clear that Silver’s ambitions were bolder and more complex. What begins as a simple fairy tale evolves into a dark and disturbing meditation on identity. Marissa Silver’s evocative and powerful prose captured me from the first page and didn’t let me go until the last.
The story begins in some unknown country (the Czech Republic?), in some unknown time (the 20th century?). A girl is born to an elderly couple and they name her Pavla. Certain attributes about the infant are different. Since Pavla’s mother sought advice from the local witch doctor, she blames herself for her daughter’s differences and pays her infant little attention. Pavla’s father delights in Pavla from the beginning and Pavla senses it. “…..Pavla feels, for the first time in her life, but not the last, the exquisite pain of love.”
When she fails to grow, Pavla’s parents, who have come to love her completely, are now overwrought with fear. In their minds, Pavla’s very survival depends on her becoming a “normal” girl even though she is intelligent, insightful, and industrious. They consult a doctor in the village who advises them to pursue horrific remedies. “Neither can bear to form the words that will make a lie of what they’ve said all her life: that they love her just the way she is and that she never needs to change.” Pavla endures these horrors that include a machine built to stretch her. “Pavla wonders who they are, these people she loves, who she believed would protect her.”
I think a psychologist might say that Pavla has a dissociative experience. In order to endure these remedies, she separates her mind from her body. She transforms from a dwarf to a wolf girl to a wolf and finally to a prisoner who resembles Pavla. And instead of doubt and disbelief at this turn of events, I believe Pavla’s iterations. Though we experience Pavla in different forms, her soul, her spirit, and her essence remain consistent. And the only person that recognizes her in these different forms is Danilo, the boy who loves her but cannot commit to her.
Silver’s ambitious book comes at an important time in our history. Women’s stories must be told and believed. Silver also seeks to repudiate the healers of every generation who act on their own prejudices and fears. She also reminds us that it is often women who perpetuate the fables that denigrate, hurt, and punish other women, even those they love.
Silver’s book is an intellectual, emotional, and spiritual meditation on the often-fractured lives of women. The novel is raw and primal, and it strikes at the core of what it means to be a young woman whose identity and destiny are determined by others. Little Nothing is as much an experience as it is a novel.
the other side of you by Salley Vickers
Salley Vickers 2006 novel The Other Side of You explores the many dimensions of love and loss and celebrates the healing power of being heard and understood. After the love of her life dies, Elizabeth Cruikshank, a divorced mother of two, attempts suicide and lands in a mental hospital. She becomes the patient of David McBride, a psychiatrist who is haunted by an older brother who died when David was five years old.
Cruikshank initially sits in silence and will not speak to McBride. Yet in one magical moment brought on by a shared admiration of the artist, Caravaggio, a sense of safety wafts into the room. Elizabeth tells the tragic story of how she found true love, how she doubted the love, and how she lost it. As Elizabeth talks and McBride listens for seven hours, Elizabeth understands more about her relationship with Thomas Gallagher and the ways and reasons she sabotaged her own happiness. Vickers, a psychologist, seems to be lifting up the healing powers of listening and understanding another person without judgment and opprobrium. As David McBride states, “We all long for someone with whom we are able to share our peculiar burdens of being alive.”
In listening to Elizabeth Cruikshank’s heartbreaking tale, David McBride realizes something about his own life. Every choice he has made connects to the guilt he feels over the death of his brother. "I had lived with this invisible gash in my side, this breach in my dyke, this crumbling portion of my sea wall.”
Vickers seems to believe that people carry within them shame and embarrassment for choices they have made or things that they have done and so they hide their most authentic selves from themselves and others. McBride states, “It is hard to account for the common human resistance to happiness, unless it is that we would rather be crippled by what we lack than risk the pain that is one potential consequence of placing our secret selves in others’ hands.” And yet, paradoxically, he also says, “I believe that we are in anguish until someone finally finds us out.”
Though I found the characters distant, I applaud Vickers attempt to write a novel rich with history and ideas. The Other Side of You includes the poetry of TS Elliot, the art of Caravaggio, parables from the Bible, a positive representation of a therapeutic relationship, and the encouraging premise that people can be healed.
