Details:
- author: Ellen Marie Wiseman
- full title: The Lost Girls of Willowbrook
- narrator: Morgan Hallett
- genre: thriller, historical fiction
- topics: #mentalhealth, #Willowbrook
- publisher: Recorded Books
- publish date: 30.08.2022
- timing: 13:13:00
My Rating of the Audiobook:
- content: 💙💙💙.5
- narration: 💙💙💙💙
Excerpt from the Book:
People still search the woods for the remains of the lost children.
Sixteen-year-old Sage Winters picked up the bus tokens with shaking fingers and stepped away from the station window, her friends' haunting words playing over and over in her mind like a creepy childhood rhyme. It wasn't the first time she'd heard warning-everyone who lived on Staten Island understood the need to keep their eyes on the ground when they enetred the woods-but the more she thought about Heather and Dawn repeating those words the previous night, the angrier she grew. Why would they say something so awful instead of trying to comfort her? Why wouldn't they offer to help her find out what had happened to Rosemary?
My Thoughts:
The blurb promised Girl, Interrupted meets One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest, so I picked this up. Add a thriller to this equation, and you get The Lost Girls of Willowbrook. The novel is a fictional story set in a Willowbrook State School on Staten Island, a mental institution that shocked America when exposed in the 1970s.Sage Winters had an identical twin Rosemary that died of pneumonia six years ago. Or so she was told. But this was not true. Her sister was at Willowbrook all this time because of her mental health issues. Six years after Rosemary’s supposed death, Sage overhears a conversation and finds out that her sister is alive in Willowbrook State School and is now missing. Telling no one, she goes to Willowbrook to help find her.
We learn some details about the neglect and mistreatment of patients. Those are based on actual events revealed during the exposure of the facility. But I did not expect the story to be a thriller. More than that, I hoped it would be a psychological drama about life in Willowbrook. I expected a different genre, and some parts were not to my liking. But I still enjoyed the story.
A few facts about Willowbrook from Wikipedia:
"Willowbrook State School was a state-supported institution for children with intellectual disabilities located in the Willowbrook neighborhood on Staten Island in New York City from 1947 until 1987.The school was designed for 4,000, but by 1965 it had a population of 6,000. At the time, it was the biggest state-run institution for people with mental disabilities in the United States. Conditions and questionable medical practices and experiments prompted Senator Robert F. Kennedy to call it a "snake pit". The institution gained national infamy in 1972, when Geraldo Rivera did an exposé on the conditions there. Public outcry led to its closure in 1987, and to federal civil rights legislation protecting people with disabilities."
More you can read on Wikipedia page.
About the Author:
