102. What She Left Behind

Rating:  ☆☆

Recommended by:  Pam Dupont

Author:   Ellen Marie Wiseman

Genre:  Historical Fiction, Fiction. Mystery

368 pages, published December 31, 2013

Reading Format:  Audio Book

 

Summary

Ten years ago, Izzy Stone’s mother fatally shot her father while he slept. Devastated by her mother’s apparent insanity, Izzy, now seventeen, refuses to visit her in prison. But her new foster parents, employees at a local museum, have enlisted Izzy’s help in cataloging items at a long-shuttered state asylum. There, amid piles of abandoned belongings, Izzy discovers a stack of unopened letters and an old journal written by Clara Cartwright.  When Clara was eighteen years old in 1929 she was caught between her overbearing parents and her love for an Italian immigrant named Bruno.  When she rejects a loveless arranged marriage, Clara is committed to a public asylum.  As Izzy deals with her own challenges, Clara’s story keeps drawing her into the past.  

 

Quotes 

“The world was full of broken people, and all the hospitals and institutions and jails could never mend their fractured hearts, wounded minds, and trampled spirits.”

 

“The earth and everything on it was cast black for those last few minutes of daylight, as if evil ruled the world for that short period of time, before the stars and moon came out to illuminate the night sky and remind everyone and everything that there really was lightness and goodness in the universe, that there really was hope and heaven.”

 

“Either way, the thought of entire lives lost—family celebrations, Christmases and birthdays, love affairs and bedtime stories, weddings and high school graduations—because of a misfire or unexplained chaos inside a person’s brain, made her chest constrict. It wasn’t fair.”

My Take

I haven’t given two stars to many books, but that is the best I can do for What She Left Behind.  Stringing together clichés and worn out tropes does not make for compelling reading.