What She Left Behind  -  Ellen Marie Wiseman

                      My guilty pleasure read.

I chose this has my guilty pleasure read off of my TBR because I really liked this author's book ,"The Life She was Given".  I enjoyed this book as well but it was a harder read for me , maybe because of the subject matter.

I would put this in the YA genre because one of the main characters is 17 year old Izzy who is a foster child.  Izzy is our present day voice who lives with her foster parents because her mother is in prison for killing Izzy's father.  Izzy has to deal with some high school bullying , questioning why her mother would kill her father,  and then having to help her foster mother clear out an old insane asylum for the Historical Society.  Here is where we meet the second voice of the book,   Clara.

Clara is from the early 1930's when it was common practice for women to end up in asylums just for disobeying their or talking back or being a troublesome burden to you husband.

So we go between the two ladies,  Izzy trying to find out about Clara through her belongings and Clara living in the asylum trying to convince people that she is not insane.  This was the hard part for me because of the descriptions of the abuse that was done to the patients. 

I have already put two more of Ellen M Wiseman's books on my TBR.