Before We Were Yours

It was good enough to finish, but not much more than that. I did want to see how it wrapped up, but getting there was painful. The story is a fictionalized account of real events - in other words, the orphanage existed, but these particular orphans are not real themselves.

Enough other reviewers have shown quotes of some of the dialogue that is both unnatural and unbelievable - and not written in a way that people actually talk. Some dialogue is jarringly obvious to be intended as the voice of the omniscient narrator, and this really takes me out of the story personally.

So many works of fiction for reading and TV today explore the duality of seemingly “evil” characters - they are often no longer portrayed as evil antagonists simply for the sake of having a conflict. Instead we are given more opportunity to see why these people end up so, what makes them tick, what motivates them. And yeah, they often make good decisions along with their bad / amoral / unethical ones. But not these orphanage owners. Unfortunately the reader is given all the bad and none of the reasoning. Sure money is an obvious motivator, but there was not nearly enough exploration of how a person or persons decide to treat children like chattel solely for the purposes of making money. I would have loved more of an exploration of this. I suppose these were real people and in fact many died before being able to testify their motivations, reasoning, turning points, and the author chose not to guess.

The story was OK - the children's story was melodramatic, predictable, gut-wrenchingly sad to the point I felt manipulated. The “present” day story was just not good - mainly characters that did things for the purpose of telling the story the author wanted to tell, NOT characters with their own motivations and lives. And to me, that's an uninteresting, uninspiring way to tell a story.

** Edit ** Added later that I have given higher ratings to books both less believable and with worse dialogue. The trouble with this book is that it is so highly rated on Goodreads! And winner of Best Historical Fiction in 2017, which is why I'm so much more critical. This is not good historical fiction. **