Author Ellen Marie Wiseman’s new novel opens with one of the best first sentences I have come across in a long time: “People still search the woods for the remains of lost children.” WOW! That sentence grabbed me by the throat and didn’t let go until I got to the end. And as I read, Wiseman’s story became more and more horrifying. Stephen King doesn’t write stories as scary as this one.
The novel is set in the real-life Willowbrook State School, 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. When the novel takes place, it is 1971 with a population of 8,000. Many New York parents threatened to send their misbehaving children there.
“State School” is a misnomer. There was no teaching going on in the forty-building campus; It was a dumping ground for mental, physical, and emotionally disabled children. Every scary story you have ever heard about these places comes out in this novel: beatings drugs, sexual abuses, starvations.
The novel opens with sixteen-year-old Sage Winters on her way to Willowbrook. She has recently learned that not only her twin sister, Rosemary, whom she thought was dead, is still alive, but she has spent the last six years there, plus she is now missing. Sage doesn’t know much about Willowbrook, but she knows she cannot rest until her sister is found.
Sage is headed there to form a search party, or whatever needs to be done to find Rosemary. But when she arrives, the staff believe that she is her sister and treat her as such. She is sedated and thrown into Rosemary’s routine. It was an easy way to get inside, true, but the place is a nightmare. The book’s publisher, Kensington Books, says that is “conjures “Girl, Interrupted” meets “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.”
There is, however, one bright spot: Eddie, one of the janitors, can tell the girls apart. He vows to help her get out of there. The trip to the tunnels that beneath the building is as terrifying as what goes on above them.
This is not a beach read. It's a hard read, but one that I could not put down. Some of the descriptions of the conditions there made me gag. “The Lost Girls of Willowbrook” receives 6 out of 5 stars in Julie’s world.
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