This book had come so highly recommended that I moved it up on my TBR pile. It didn't disappoint, and I can see why many feel this book should be made into a movie.
Any parent would relate to the horror of waking up to find your infant gone from their crib!
That, in itself, cemented my intense interest in what happened, how the family will ever be able to move forward, and how the story will end.
The author doesn't tie up the story in a short time, the story covers several years and weaves in backstory as to why people act the way they do. And, she doesn't take the easy way out in "solving" the mystery. It's a wonderful, heartfelt, heartbreaking, and heartwarming story! ( )

Great book! Kept my interest throughout the entire book. It is sad in certain parts and happy in some. It is about a girl that has a stillborn baby takes someone else’s baby but I won’t spoil it. It certainly doesn’t go the way I thought it would. ( )

"A missing child sets the lives of three women on a collision course in this powerful and compelling novel by USA Today bestselling author Bette Lee Crosby."
A very moving, hard to put down, look at what happens with the unimaginable does happen. ( )

After three days in a field at Harold Baker’s Georgia farm, the 1971 Hesterville Music Festival moves on . . . and one of the attendees sneaks through an unlocked door to steal six-month-old Emily Dixon from her crib and spirits her away from her family.

What will happen to the baby? To her family? To the one who took her? And what of Emily’s return to her devastated family?

And that is the story . . . how those in the midst of this heartache . . . Rachel and George, Vicki and Murphy, Angela and Kenny . . . cope with the situation. And, of course, how Emily’s life unfolds.

Believable, nuanced characters fill the pages of this narrative. They [especially Vicki’s sister] are a bit dense and naïve at times; they all know right from wrong, they all know what they ought to do, what the right decision should be, but they all let things go along without doing anything.

Through it all, readers discover how each family copes and what happens to the little girl at the center of this heartrending tragedy. While the stories of each of the women are likely to be of interest to readers, the unfolding narrative simply drags . . . and drags . . . and drags.

The story alternates between the three women who become Emily’s mother . . . her birth mother, the woman who took her from her family, and the woman who raised her in the belief that she actually was her late sister’s child [in this family, her name is Lara]. The man [Vicki's boyfriend] believed to be the baby’s father just slips out of the picture, never to be heard from again even though he knew his girlfriend had taken the baby from her crib and stolen her from her family.

In a perfect world [where, of course, Emily would never be taken in the first place], the ending presented here would fit like a glove and make perfect sense. But it is likely to leave readers struggling with their willing suspension of disbelief . . . it’s the perfect solution, arrived at in the perfect way, for a perfect world, assuming, of course, that readers willingly accept the HUGE . . . and patently unlikely . . . event that happens near the end of the summer in 1989.

The story, filled with heartache, love, triumph, and joy, speaks to the best of us in the worst of times. But readers are certain to find it all just a bit too much to accept despite the heartfelt tears and the denouement that neatly ties everything up in a sweet little bow. ( )

In August 1971 a music festival came to a small town in Georgia and changed the lives of a family in town. A couple went to bed exhausted from the blaring sounds of the festival and when they awoke they discovered that their baby girl had been stolen from her crib. And so began a nightmare for the family. Rachel and George Dixon, along with George’s mother, Helen, navigate the sorrow of a missing child taken from them under awful circumstances.
This book is a story of sadness and despair, recovery and redemption and hope. It is the story of a woman who slowly rejoins the world with the help of others and her hope that one day she will be reunited with her daughter.
I loved this story and I loved the way the author wrote with raw emotion, and showed the power of forgiveness in helping to heal.
I can’t wait to read more from this author.
#EmilyGone #BetteLeeCrosby ( )