Don't You Ever: My Mother and Her Secret Son

I was given a copy of this book by Harper Collins in exchange for an honest.

Today's post is on Don't You Ever: My Mother and Her Secret Son by Mary Carter Bishop. It is 256 pages long and is published by Harper Collins. The cover is a beautiful landscape picture that has been ripped in half. The intended reader is someone who is interested in memoirs. There is mild foul language, no sex, and no violence in this book. There Be Spoilers Ahead.

From the back of the book- From a prizewinning journalist, Mary Carter Bishop, a moving and beautifully rendered memoir about the half-brother she didn’t know existed that hauntingly explores family, class, secrets, and fate.
Applying for a passport as an adult, Mary Carter Bishop made a shocking discovery. She had a secret half-brother. Her mother, a farm manager’s wife on a country estate, told Mary Carter the abandoned boy was a youthful "mistake" from an encounter with a married man. There’d been a home for unwed mothers; foster parents; an orphanage.
Nine years later, Mary Carter tracked Ronnie down at the barbershop where he worked, and found a near-broken man—someone kind, and happy to meet her, but someone also deeply and irreversibly damaged by a life of neglect and abuse at the hands of an uncaring system. He was also disfigured because of a rare medical condition that would eventually kill him, three years after their reunion. During that window, Mary Carter grew close to Ronnie, and as she learned more about him she became consumed by his story. How had Ronnie’s life gone so wrong when hers had gone so well? How could she reconcile the doting, generous mother she knew with a woman who could not bring herself to acknowledge her own son?
Digging deep into her family’s lives for understanding, Mary Carter unfolds a sweeping story of religious intolerance, poverty, fear, ambition, class, and social expectations. Don’t You Ever is a modern Dickensian tale about a child seemingly cursed from birth; a woman shattered by guilt; a husband plagued by self-doubt; a prodigal daughter whose innocence was cruelly snatched away—all living in genteel central Virginia, a world defined by extremes of rural poverty and fabulous wealth.
A riveting memoir about a family haunted by a shameful secret, Don’t You Ever is a powerful story of a woman’s search for her long-hidden sibling, and the factors that profoundly impact our individual destinies.

Review- This is a very sad memoir of a troubled family. Bishop as an adult discovers that her mother had a child when she was a young woman and gave the child up. From there she learns more about her mother, her brother, and her family history. It is a very sad read because Bishop's brother had a very hard life for many reasons but their mother contributed to his life being harder. Bishop learns about how her brother was conceived, how her mother was treated as a single mother, and why she gave her son up. From there we travel with Bishop as she traces her brother's life as it runs parallel to hers. Bishop sees the mother she had versus the mother that her brother had and why were they so different.It is a moving, haertbreaking story about a broken family that still tries to love each other no matter how hard that can be.

I give this book a Four out of Five stars.