{ No Names to be Given by Julia Brewer - TLC Book Tour }

About No Names to Be Given

Publisher: Admission Press (August 3, 2021)

Paperback: 334 pages

“A gorgeous, thrilling, and important novel! These strong women will capture your heart.”-Stacey Swann, author of Olympus, Texas

1965. Sandy runs away from home to escape her mother’s abusive boyfriend. Becca falls in love with the wrong man. And Faith suffers a devastating attack. With no support and no other options, these three young, unwed women meet at a maternity home hospital in New Orleans where they are expected to relinquish their babies and return home as if nothing transpired.

But such a life-altering event can never be forgotten, and no secret remains buried forever. Twenty-five years later, the women are reunited by a blackmailer, who threatens to expose their secrets and destroy the lives they’ve built. That shattering revelation would shake their very foundations-and reverberate all the way to the White House.

Told from the three women’s perspectives, this mesmerizing story is based on actual experiences of women in the 1960s who found themselves pregnant but unmarried, pressured by family and society to make horrific decisions. How that inconceivable act changed women forever is the story of No Names to Be Given, a heartbreaking but uplifting novel of family and redemption.

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About Julia Brewer Daily

Julia Brewer Daily is a Texan with a southern accent. She holds a B.S. in English and a M.S. degree in Education from the University of Southern Mississippi. She was the founding director of the Greater Belhaven Market, a producers’ only market in a historic neighborhood in Jackson, and even shadowed Martha Stewart. As the Executive Director of the Craftsmen’s Guild of Mississippi (300 artisans from 19 states) which operates the Mississippi Craft Center, she wrote their stories to introduce them to the public. Daily is an adopted child from a maternity home hospital in New Orleans. She searched and found her birth mother and through a DNA test, her birth father’s family, as well. A lifelong southerner, she now resides on a ranch in Fredericksburg, Texas, with her husband Emmerson and Labrador Retrievers, Memphis Belle and Texas Star.

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REVIEW:

What a beautiful yet heartbreaking story.  

 

I think we have all grown up hearing about the horrific stories of the 1950s and 1960s, where young, unmarried women became pregnant and were not only hidden from society, but forced to give up their babies for adoption.  All in the name of not bringing shame to the family.

 

I've never been able to understand that way of thinking, but then again, I live in different times, and I can't judge those who lived in that era, for their beliefs.

 

No Names to be Given follows the story of 3 such women, who meet in a maternity hospital in New Orleans.  They quickly forge a friendship, while being pressured by the hospital nurses and doctors to give up their children to strangers.  They face a horrible decision, because they're expected to just walk away as if nothing happened, and return to their homes, go about their lives, and forget about the babies they leave behind.

 

These kind of stories have become well known.  We have heard multiple accounts of such happenings, but we don't always understand the repercussions and the consequences of those adoptions.  

 

In this novel, albeit a fictional story, it IS inspired by true events, and the author does a great job of bringing us the insight into what these women were thinking, feeling, and forced to do.  Though there wasn't much character development, and I ended the book feeling like I wished I had known these women a bit more, the accounts that we were given, were enough to make my heart hurt.

I can never imagine being in their shoes, feeling like the whole world is against me, and knowing that the pain of labor I am about to endure, will leave me with empty arms, as my child is whisked away, never to be seen again.

 

Thank you to TLC Book Tours and Admission Press for providing me with this review copy.