NO NAMES TO BE GIVEN

By

JULIA BREWER DAILY

Categories: Women’s Fiction / Vintage Fiction / Adoption / 1960s
Publisher: Admission Press Inc.
Pub Date: August 3, 2021

Pages: 334 pages

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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 in alternating chapters, 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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Praise

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

An insightful and sympathetic view offered into the lives of those who were adopted and those who adopted them. —Pam Johnson, author of Justice for Ella.

A novel worthy of a Lifetime movie adaptation. —Jess Hagemann, author of Headcheese.

Readers can expect deep knowledge of the world the characters inhabit. —Sara Kocek, author of Promise Me Something.

This book is a relevant read and one that will keep readers guessing page after page until the very end. —The US Review of Books

Today’s young women, especially, need to absorb No Names to Be Given. —Midwest Book Review, D. Donovan, Senior Reviewer

This story touched my heart in so many ways. From the struggles that the three women went through to how it affected the children that they never knew until much later in life.

We meet Becca, Sandy, and Faith – three young women that find themselves pregnant in 1965 when being unwed and pregnant was frowned upon. Each of these young women has a story to tell and the chapters alternate between the three as we learn about their families, struggles, beliefs, and so much more. On top of the women being unwed, Becca is involved in an interracial relationship. She doesn’t see anything wrong with this because she grew up with multiple races at home. Granted, they were employees and not family members, but there was a close bond between them. Faith also has demons to battle when she is raped by someone that is supposed to be close to the family. I thought it sad that she couldn’t tell her father the truth because she feared he wouldn’t believe her and he probably would not have believed her. Sandy left home and ended up finding her way into a gentleman’s club. Since this is the 1960s, it was very tame by today’s standards. Obviously, she can’t perform if she is pregnant hence why she ended up at the home.

These women come together in a maternity home in New Orleans and end up in the same room. While they don’t share all of their past, these do become fast friends especially when their children are all born on the same day. I liked how they pledged to remember August 22nd and to say a prayer and light a candle each year. The home was quite interesting and the couple that ran the home did care about those that crossed their threshold. They kept impeccable records which will come in handy later in the book because none of the women know if they had a boy or a girl since that was the time when they would put women under while delivering the baby.

The book does jump forward a decade later and we see how the three women are faring in life. Have they accomplished their dreams? Is there more that they want to do in life? What does the future hold for them? I have to admire the entrepreneurial spirit of Sandy and Becca’s drive to fight for desegregation and the rights for all people to be treated the same. Faith has her own issues with her career and her guilt. We also get a glimpse of another character that will become pivotal near the end.

We then jump forward another decade and we start to meet the children. There are a few surprises along the way, along with some tragedies. I like how the author introduced DNA testing as one way they connected. This is old school since it is the mid 90s and reports were mailed. I can’t imagine the overwhelming feelings of finding out who your birth parents are and how this situation came to be for each of them.

Overall, I loved the story and it was even more poignant when I read in the author notes that she was also adopted and this journey could have been her own in seeking her birth parents. I’m so glad that times have changed and it isn’t taboo to be an unwed mother. There are so many women that probably wish they could have done something differently or had other options. I enjoyed how the author wove social issues of the times into the character’s lives and made them appear as someone we might all know. Some of the revelations regarding the children were mindboggling, at least for some of these characters. The actions and reactions of these three women and their families felt authentic because we know that these situations can be emotionally charged and everyone will react differently.

We give this book 5 paws up.

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 has been a Communications Adjunct Professor at Belhaven University, Jackson, Mississippi, and Public Relations Director of the Mississippi Department of Education and Millsaps College, a liberal arts college in Jackson, MS.  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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