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1-Page Summary of Before We Were Yours

Overall Summary

Lisa Wingate’s Before We Were Yours is a novel that takes place in the South. It tells the story of two women, one from the present day and another from the past. The book switches back and forth between their stories to explain how they’re connected. Through this narrative technique, we get to know more about both women as well as their families’ histories.

The book begins with an unspecified narrator telling us about a scene that is only a guess, but it could be what happens. From there we meet Avery, who has been engaged to Elliot for some time and her father gets diagnosed with cancer. She’s trying to figure out what she should do in life because family is important to her more than work or spending time with Elliot.

Avery is a young woman who’s dealing with her father’s health issues and his dementia. She also feels as though she’s losing contact with her grandmother, so she decides to learn more about her by figuring out the clues that Grandma Judy drops from time to time. Avery finds herself spending time with Trent Turner, who helps fill in some gaps of information about Grandma Judy.

Avery’s grandmother was a Southern society lady, but she didn’t know that her mother had been an orphan. Her mother gave birth to Avery’s grandmother when she was young and poor on the Mississippi River. The children were stolen from their mother and given away to rich families, with only one of them not having golden curls. It took Grandma Judy years to find three of her sisters, but she never found her brothers again. This is why each sister wears dragonfly bracelets as reminders of their siblings who they lost forever in the Tennessee Children’s Society Home.

The other half of the story is told by Rill Foss, Queenie’s oldest daughter. She has five siblings, and her mom is pregnant with twins. The midwife says that if she doesn’t go to the hospital, both Queenie and her babies could die. Briny (Rill’s dad) takes them in a boat to see Zede, the river gypsy doctor who leaves an orphan named Silas behind to help take care of Rill’s younger siblings.

Briny thought he was signing a form to pay the hospital bill, but it turns out that he signed away his children. They were taken by workers at Tennessee Children’s Home Society and abused physically and emotionally. Camellia, who resisted Miss Tann at every step, disappeared under mysterious circumstances.

Rill is born to a poor family, but she has many siblings. She watches all of them leave her and never return except for Fern, who’s adopted by another family. They treat her well, but Rill refuses to forget about the rest of her birth family and runs away with Fern back to their shantyboat named Arcadia. When they arrive there, they find out that their mother died and their father drinks often because he can’t handle his grief from losing his wife. He crashes the boat into a dock in flame while drunk one night and dies instantly. The girls are saved but now Rill knows she must accept this new life as May since Briny was no longer alive when it happened. However, she stays connected with everyone in her old age even though some things changed over time like names or places where people lived.

Prelude

The novel begins with a setting that the narrator knows she’ll never see. Christine is in the throes of childbirth, thrashing around and screaming because of her pain. She’s so medicated that she doesn’t know what’s happening to her or to the baby, but a man who becomes a grandfather for the first time today talks with medical staff about his daughter having another child. He almost gives up hope when he hears it would be too dangerous for his daughter, but then one doctor says there might be something they could try.