Book Review | ARC Review | The Lost Girls of Willowbrook by Ellen Marie Wiseman

Sage believed her identical twin sister, Rosemary, had died of pneumonia six years ago but overhears a phone conversation that her step father is having with the Willowbrook State School that Rosemary had been missing. Her step father admits that they lied about Rosemary and that she was admitted into Willowbrook due to her schizophrenia and other mental health issues. Sage decides to go to Willowbrook to help find her sister but a case of mistaken identity had her stuck inside Willowbrook with everyone thinking she is her sister. What she finds while trying to figure out where her sister went is unbelievable. The school is not a school – patients are experimented on, left in their own filth, treated horribly.

Sage needs to find out what happened to her sister while also making sure she gets out. Did she escape? Was she taken by Cropsy, the rumored serial killer that parents warned their kids about to account for all the missing people? Was she a medical experiment gone wrong? There is a slight thriller element to this book that kept me very engaged. 

I highly recommend looking up Willowbrook. While this was a work of fiction, it is based on the actual facility that operated through the 80s. The author goes into extreme detail about the awful treatment the patients experienced during their time at Willowbrook, mainly based off a expose that made national headlines in 1972 that exposed the conditions of the school. 

Lots of trigger warnings in this book, but it was a very eye opening read and I think very well done for such a tough topic. My only critique is that there was almost too much detail about the horrible conditions that at some point you almost become immune to it.