Two families, generations apart, are forever changed by a heartbreaking injustice in this poignant novel, inspired by a true story, for readers of Orphan Train and The Nightingale.
This story is based on two timelines, one with 12 Year old Rill Foss and her four younger siblings who live on the river with their Mom and Dad. Mom has a really bad delivery of twins gone wrong and has to be taken into the hospital. Somehow she is coerced to sign away her children who were left to their own on the river in their boat, the Arcadia.
They are whisked away to The Tennessee Children's Home Society orphanage, the Foss children are told that they will see their parents soon but that is a lie, they find out everything about the home is based on lies.
Present day a Senator's daughter comes upon a woman in a Senior Center she is visiting and the woman steals her bracelet. When she goes to collect it she looks in on the woman and the story begins in present day as she hunts for what she thinks might be her Grandmothers past, and it doesn't line up with the pretty Senator's daughter who is being groomed to run for a Senate seat herself one day.
I believe I won this kindle book from Good Reads in exchange for an honest review. The book drags just a bit, I was able to pick it up and put it down at will, it took a while before the two stories come together and things start moving then. I was hoping this book would be one that has me from the very beginning and that it would be one I would be totally engrossed in. The subject matter, although the characters for the most part were fictional, there was actually an orphanize run by the same woman and they stole parents children, kids along the streets, told Mothers their new borns were born dead, they did terrible things and then made great amounts of money by selling the children famous families that had the money to buy them. It's a good read, one worth reading, and you feel that everything that happens to the children there is just wrong!
