Tuesday, May 23, 2017
Tuesday, May 16, 2017
Book Review: What She Left Behind
by Ellen Marie Wiseman
What She Left Behind
By Ellen Marie Wiseman
Kindle,
paperback
337
pagesKensington Publishing Corporation
What She Left Behind by Ellen Marie Wiseman easily ranks as one of the best books I’ve ever read. It is a dual plotted fiction about two young women, Clara Elizabeth Cartwright and Isabelle Stone.
Clara
is eighteen when the story begins in 1929. Her father is a rich, powerful
banker and a spiteful man. When Clara disobeys him and rejects his arranged
marriage because she is in love with a poor, Italian immigrant, her father is
furious and sends her to a genteel home for nervous invalids. When her father
loses everything in the stock market crash, he sends her to Willard State
Asylum, a very crude institution to say the least. For Clara, who was not
mentally ill when she arrived there, it was a challenge for her to retain her
sanity in those conditions and knowing what her parents did to her for just
disobeying. Clara tries to tell the doctor that she is sane, but he fails to
believe her.
In
1995, Isabelle (Izzy) Stone and her foster mother, Peg, stumble upon Clara’s
steamer trunk at the now closed Willard when the state for a short time,
allowed Peg’s museum into the closed asylum to photograph and review old
records. Izzy is intrigued when they find Clara’s diary and reads it, which
sets Izzy on a journey of her own to find out more about Clara’s life hoping it
will help Izzy understand her own mother who is in prison for killing Izzy’s
father. Izzy wants to understand what would drive someone to do such a
horrendous crime.
Destiny
places Izzy on a life-changing path when she delves deep into the mystery of
Clara’s life at Willard. Moreover, in the end, finds out something startling
about herself, her mother, and Clara.
Clara's
life was an excellent story and I could not put the book down until I seen what
happened to her. At the end, Wiseman cleverly revealed how Izzy and Clara’s destiny overlapped. The story also showed an interesting parallel between
life today for the youth and the strict upbringing that children were forced to
endear in the early twentieth century and earlier.
Ellen
Marie Wiseman’s next book, The Life She
Was Given, will release July 25, 2017.
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