No Names to Be Given by Julia Brewer Daily
Historical Fiction, Women's Fiction, 334 pages
Published August 2021, by Admission Press Inc.
Today’s young women will not understand how our families made us feel shame so intensely; we surrendered our first-born children to strangers. - Faith Reynolds, No Names to Be Given
The widely anticipated debut novel by Julia Brewer Daily is a glimpse into the lives of women forced by society to gift their newborns to strangers. Although this novel is a fictional account, it mirrors many of the adoption stories of its era.
When three young unwed women meet at a maternity home hospital in New Orleans in 1965, they are expected to relinquish their babies and return home as if nothing transpired. Twenty-five years later, they are brought back together by blackmail and their secrets threatened with exposure—all the way to the White House.
Told from the three women’s perspectives in alternating chapters, we are mesmerized by the societal pressures on women in the 1960s who found themselves pregnant without marriage.
How that inconceivable act changed them forever is the story of No Names To Be Given, a novel with southern voices, love exploited, heartbreak and blackmail.
My thoughts about No Names to Be Given ~~
(I love to note the first lines of the books I'm reading. First lines can really grab a reader's attention and I love seeing where the author takes the reader after their first lines.)
First lines—"Men loved Sandy's body. She didn't have the option of leading with her wit or intellect. Her looks arrived first. It was both a blessing and a curse."
I was immediately intrigued by this story from the very first page. I'm not sure what it was that drew me in but I was totally captivated by these three young women. It was a different time for unwed women, back then in the mid 60's. There were not a lot of options available for them. After these women gave up their precious bundles, they were expected to go on and live their best lives.
We follow Sandy, Becca, and Faith as they continue forward, watching them try to get over their sadness and get back to 'normal'. We also see them come together 25 years later for a bit of healing. That is until someone starts to blackmail them to reveal their secrets. That drama and intrigue made the storyline take an exciting turn.
No Names to Be Given is an amazing debut novel that will stick with me for a long time. I fell in love with the three women and the heartbreaking stories that they all lived. The writing was a pleasure to read and flowed off the pages into my imagination, making this a story that I got lost in. I highly recommend it!
I received No Names to Be Given from Books Forward and this is my honest opinion of the book.
About the author
Julia Brewer Daily is a Texan with a southern accent. She has a B.S. in English and a M.S. degree in Education from the University of Southern Mississippi.
She has been an educator, Communications Adjunct Professor at Belhaven College, administrator, 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. She 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. She lives on a ranch in Texas with her husband Emmerson and two Labrador Retrievers, Memphis Belle and Texas Star.
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