You Were Always Mine: A Novel

“You Were Always Mine” is a novel about a Black woman named Cinnamon Haynes, who is left an abandoned white baby by a semi friend/ acquaintance “Daisy” Amanda Jacobs. Both women have traumatic upbringings and grief stricken pasts but both hope for better futures. I thought this was a fantastic novel delving into the topics of motherhood, race, and class. The story was thought provoking, contemporary, and poignant. The two lead characters were real, flawed, and yet beautiful in the same instance. I loved the Q&A at the end of the book and I think that stories like this while fiction, are totally relevant to today’s societal atmosphere. 5 stars hands down, highly recommend.

“What if a Black woman found a white baby…and kept it?” Cinnamon Haynes “found a baby in a park. A girl I barely know asked me to raise her child, and that baby got sick and went to the hospital and I worried she might die. Barely two weeks ago I didn’t own so much as a plant, and now I’m going to be a foster mom. You don’t think I know I’m over my head?” Christine Pride and Jo Piazza’s You Were Always Mine is “a provocative novel about a Black woman who finds an abandoned white baby, sending her on a collision course with her past, her family, and a birth mother who doesn’t want to be found.” Together, authors Christine Pride, childless by choice, and Jo Piazza, mother of three, interrogate complicated questions around motherhood and family. What does it mean to be a mother in America? Who gets to be a mother and why and to whom? How and why do people choose to become a mother or not? What is the right way to become a mother and what is the right way to be a mother? “Who even gets to decide what are good enough reasons for making the choices we make?...It’s dizzying to decide who should be forgiven for what and what can be justified–a knot that can never be untied no matter how patient you are.” “People love to say families come in all shapes and sizes but then get all judgmental when it’s not a mom and a dad and three kids who all match perfectly and came from the woman’s womb as a result of nice missionary sex.” “You may have been carried by someone else, you may not look a lick like me, we may not share the same blood, DNA, or color, but none of that mattered when it came to what was meant to be. There’s so little I know for sure in life except for this: you were always mine.” Beginning with Bluebell and ending with Lily, Christine Pride and Jo Piazza’s You Were Always Mine is a literary bouquet.

The overall story was pretty good. I may be a little biased because my wife is a social worker, but the way that the authors tried to paint every social worker as inept or a bad person, or someone who didn't care about the kids was a little off-putting as well. I know that some are not the best, but they are so overworked that sometimes things don't go as smoothly as planned, but every social worker I have come across in my life is genuinely trying to do their best.

The story had potential and it didn't necessarily go the way I thought it would, but that's not a bad thing! It just didn't completely suck me in like I was hoping it would.