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Oct 03, 2017KMJ_ rated this title 3 out of 5 stars
In the 21st Century, Avery meets May at a nursing home, and is immediately drawn to the old women’s story. Their story is interspersed with the story of Rill and her siblings living on the Mississippi River during the Great Depression. They are essentially kidnapped by a woman running an adoption scheme at the Tennessee Children’s Home Society. There they are abused, separated, and forced to live in terrible conditions. Meanwhile, Avery is determined to figure out the relationship between her grandmother and May. I think the book would have been better if the Avery sections weren’t there. She is the daughter of a Senator, and she’s supposedly cosmopolitan and smart, but she seems to have zero understanding of how the world works. She thinks she discovered a secret that would completely ruin her family, but there is nothing about the secret that would reflect badly on the descendants of the people involved. The pacing of the story is off, with major events only being mentioned in passing. I would have liked a lot more details about the adult lives of the children taken by the Tennessee Children’s Home Society. This book has a lot of similarities to Orphan Train by Christina Baker Klein, but it isn’t anywhere near as good.