I was really excited to read this book for a long time and I was very disappointed.
It's a very short book and most of it the author spends talking about her and her life and her family. The focus of this book doesn't seem to be about Danvers State Asylum, but about the author and how she came to be there. There's one or two short "chapters" (if you can call them that) that actually focus on Danvers State.
For someone who worked there for so long, I would have liked to read the authors memories of individuals or more about the conditions, then about her children and family.
Very disappointing.

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I really hate to knock this book because at the end I found out the author was age 78 at the time she wrote it.BUT I must be honest.

I have had this book on my wishlist for such a long time and finally got a like new copy recently. Wish I hadn't..it was nothing like it was hyped up to be..mainly ramblings that went nowhere. She would say one thing in one chapter (which by the way are very short) and then in another chapter repeat the same story. It was SO repetitive and got old very quickly. Not much info on the asylum or the patients, I found it to be more about her working there, which she never went into deep detail about, just the same thing over and over. Like most of our jobs, pretty dull stuff, I kept waiting to hear something interesting other than what she shared. I think if a proper author had taken the time to have her tell her stories that so much more could have been done with this story and this book. I was hugely disappointed in it. If you are wanting to know about what happened in this asylum (and I know a lot went on there) this is NOT the book to read to find out.

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