Ellen Marie Wiseman
KIMBERLY SCHULDT

Search for a sibling

Ellen Marie Wiseman’s new novel explores a quest to find lost twin

by RENÉE BACHER

Have you ever read a book and told yourself, “I could do better than that”?

Ellen Marie Wiseman, an avid reader who has lived all of her life in a tiny New York hamlet near the Canadian border, had this experience more than once. Wiseman, who has written several historical novels, including this month’s book buyer’s pick, The Lost Girls of Willowbrook, had no formal training whatsoever as a writer, though. While raising her children, and devouring books in her free time, Wiseman wrote stories as a hobby. When her kids went off to college, she penned The Plum Tree, loosely based on her mother’s and grandmother’s experiences in Germany during World War II.

“The first draft took about three days,” she says, “but I knew it was terrible and I’d have to rewrite it.”

Rewriting took six years. After 72 agent rejections, Wiseman was starting to think about self-publishing but decided to give it one more try and landed the agent who sold the book to a publisher in 2012. It was a two-book deal and Wiseman was terrified about the next one, which she had been given only a year to write.

The second book, Coal River, a historical novel about child labor in a Pennsylvania mining town, did very well. Wiseman subsequently wrote three more historical novels, and in 2020, The Orphan Collector, set in the U.S. during the 1918 Spanish flu pandemic, hit the New York Times bestseller list.

Wiseman’s latest novel, The Lost Girls of Willowbrook, leads readers into the world of Willowbrook State School, a real-life institution on Staten Island, New York. When main character Sage Winters discovers her twin sister, Rosemary, is not dead, as she has been led to believe, but has recently escaped from Willowbrook, Sage’s quest to find her begins.

In 1972, Geraldo Rivera made a documentary exposé about the atrocities that took place at Willowbrook, a so-called “school” where there were no classes and children lived in squalor while being neglected, abused and subjected to medical experiments. When Wiseman came across a story in the newspaper about Willowbrook a couple of years ago, she became absorbed and dug deeper into its secrets.

“I was like, ‘Wow, this is amazing. How come I’ve never heard of this place?’ ” she says.

Wiseman has always been bothered by the mistreatment of people who are different, a theme that runs through each of her novels. Her hope for the Lost Girls of Willowbrook is that readers will want to keep turning the pages and find inspiration in the main character’s ability to turn heartbreak into a force for good.

“I hope that people will be bothered by the reality of Willowbrook and that it will serve as a reminder that we need to be more protective of the most vulnerable among us,” she says. “Every human being has the right to learn and grow and, above all, to be treated with kindness, respect and compassion.”

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Renée Bacher is a health and lifestyle writer based in Baton Rouge, Louisiana.

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