If you’ve followed the Gypsy Rose Blanchard Story, and you’ve watched Dateline, you’ve watched the HBO movie, and you’ve even watch The Act, picking up a copy of Darling Rose Gold is your next move. You won’t be sorry.
Because Darling Rose Gold is fiction, but it’s an imagined story of a girl just like Gypsy Rose who has fallen victim to her very own mother through Munchausen by proxy syndrome. When someone pretends that their child, spouse or someone close to them under their care is sick to get attention. But the pretending often leads to real poisons and ailments that make the otherwise perfectly healthy person, sickly and weak.
It’s horrifying and fascinating all rolled up into one. And this debut is not one to be missed.
From the Publisher:
For the first eighteen years of her life, Rose Gold Watts believed she was seriously ill. She was allergic to everything, used a wheelchair and practically lived at the hospital. Neighbors did all they could, holding fundraisers and offering shoulders to cry on, but no matter how many doctors, tests, or surgeries, no one could figure out what was wrong with Rose Gold.
Turns out her mom, Patty Watts, was just a really good liar.
After serving five years in prison, Patty gets out with nowhere to go and begs her daughter to take her in. The entire community is shocked when Rose Gold says yes.
Patty insists all she wants is to reconcile their differences. She says she’s forgiven Rose Gold for turning her in and testifying against her. But Rose Gold knows her mother. Patty Watts always settles a score.
Unfortunately for Patty, Rose Gold is no longer her weak little darling…
And she’s waited such a long time for her mother to come home.
My Review:
My Darling Rose Gold picks up on a fictional Gypsy Rose Blanchard type story when her mother is getting out of prison. Her mother, Patty, served 5 years for child abuse – almost killing her daughter and lying for years to her friends, family and doctors for years about her daughter’s health.
So already, the story has changed. Rose Gold didn’t murder her mother and run away with a boy. But that doesn’t meant that she doesn’t have plans for her mother.
Rose Gold is a new mom, impregnated by her internet boyfriend who is no longer in the picture. But she’s done well for herself over the past five years. She has a job, she was able to save up and buy her grandparent’s old house in her small town, and the community has rallied around her to support her just as her mother never did.
But Rose Gold and Patty are in a co-dependent relationship. So when Patty is let out of prison and has nowhere to go, Rose Gold extends an invite for her to move in with her and her son Adam. And slowly, Patty worms her way back into her daughter’s and grandchild’s heart. But that’s not the end.
My Darling Rose Gold was so readable and interesting and I loved the characters that Wrobel created. Rose Gold is vulnerable, awkward and often falls prey to those who at first want to help her and then get annoyed by her. The story is complicated and deliciously readable.
Special thanks to Berkley Publishing Group and Netgalley for an e-galley in exchange for my honest review. This one releases March 17, 2020. Pre-order your copy:
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