"Grace is Gone"

"Grace is Gone"
Written by Emily Elgar
Reviewed by Diana Iozzia

As impressed by Emily Elgar's first novel, "If You Knew Her", I felt extremely excited to read her next, "Grace is Gone". Unfortunately, my interest fell apart very quickly, once I had realized that this story was inspired by the Gypsy Rose Blanchard murder case. If you are not familiar with the case, teenage Gypsy killed her mother, after realizing that her mother had been drugging her and making her believe that she was sick with many life-threatening ailments, as a result of Munchausen's By Proxy syndrome. Factitious disorders, such as Munchausen's, cause the parent to injure either themselves or their child for a number of reasons, by feeding them unhealthily or providing unnecessary medication.

In the past two years, victims of factitious disorders have been manipulated into telling their stories for films, books, and television shows. Many authors have capitalized and unkindly used others' stories to make their own, which is a completely unfair way to write a book. When we give attention to stories like this, it can cause a ripple effect, allowing sick individuals to take these elements and copycat them into their own lives. For example, there is a highly saturated book market for characters either creating or surviving school shootings, which provides detailed fictional or nonfictional accounts for mentally disturbed individuals to admire.

When a writer chooses to write a story based on a crime, they are making money off someone else's tragedy. Writing a book with detail, dialogue, and interesting characters is no easy feat, but if it mainly profits off a tragedy, I believe it to be wrong, placing a major sour taste in my mouth. I feel very ashamed by the book market of publishing houses who allow stories like this to still be written. Although making money is a large concern for publishing houses, I still believe that they too have a responsibility for the content they publish, if it can be harmful to readers or to those the story was inspired by. Not consulting the family from which this story was ripped can be ethically grey.

I personally found this book to be very disinteresting, for more reasons than the Blanchard family's tragedy. The story is told in two different perspectives, from a neighbor who lived near Grace, the afflicted girl, and her family, and from a news reporter who has morally wronged the family before by butting into their lives and even receiving a restraining order. These characters are hardly helpful, constantly fighting, and hardly investigating anything.

Telling the story through the eyes of characters scarcely involved in the disappearance further perpetuates that the author wants to be tasteful, but she eventually creates a very tasteless novel. Manipulating a true crime story to profit from is completely unethical, and I was very disappointed in the decisions made by this author. Providing many similar details to the true case does not prove that this author wanted to tell the tale of Gypsy, but she wanted to make the story her own, which it is not.

In conclusion, I had once been a fan of stories ripped from the headlines. However, maturity (and living more in the real world) allowed me to realize that we should not benefit from misfortunes of others, especially without permission. I used to be a massive fan of shows like "Law and Order". I would have wished this author took the idea of a factitious disorder into her own hands, creating new characters, rather than creating a Frankenstein story, profiting off victims. I hope there is a lesson to learn here. I do not recommend this novel, and I am not so sure I now recommend this author.

I received an advance review edition from the publisher in exchange for reading and reviewing purposes.