The Life She Was Given: A Moving and Emotional Saga of Family and Resilient Women

by Ellen Marie Wiseman

Book Overview

Before We Were Yours meets Water for Elephants in New York Times bestselling author Ellen Marie Wiseman's vivid, daring, emotional novel about the devastating power of family secrets--beginning in the poignant, lurid world of a Depression-era traveling circus and coming full circle in the transformative 1950s.

On a summer evening in 1931, Lilly Blackwood glimpses circus lights from the grimy window of her attic bedroom...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1496749863
• ISBN13: 9781496749864
• Release Date: January 2025
• Publisher: Kensington Publishing Corporation
• Length: 384 Pages
• Weight: 0.81 lbs.

Customer Reviews

a must read

best read ever

I really enjoyed this book

I really enjoyed this book! Some parts of it were hard to read, but overall it was a good story!

Ellen Marie Wiseman, a new favorite author!!!

Started out with "The Plum Tree" and I was hooked! Went shopping and bought all but one of her books and still looking for the last one! My MUTTI was from Germany and described a lot of what Ellen Marie Wiseman described. From the landscape to the villages to the foods! I'm 73 and haven't been to Germany in many years but the book brought back a lot of memories. My mother lived a short distance from Dachau and told my sister and I all she remembered from those days! Grosmutter and Grosvater were farmers and times were very iffy for everyone! Well done!!! 'LIFE SHE WAS GIVEN' was another book that just drug you in that you couldn't put the book down! Sometimes it is good to be reminded how cruel some people can be! And how love and being able to care about people can still come out of evil!