Eventually, Patty sees her old maroon van headed towards her. Patty waits outside the prison for Rose Gold who is late picking her up. If she did all of those terrible things to her daughter why would Rose Gold offer to pick her up today? Instead, she blames the prosecutor, the jury, and the reporters who just wanted their story. She doesn’t blame Rose Gold even though her daughter testified against her. Patty has always maintained that she is innocent.

The story opens as Patty Watts aka “Poisonous Patty” is being released from prison after serving five years for aggravated child abuse. This creepy psychological thriller is sure to be enjoyed by those who devoured Gone Girl, Girl on the Train and domestic thrillers from authors like Megan Abbott and JP Delaney.A plucked from the headlines gripping read! Each woman displays Jekyll and Hyde-style personalities, and the reader is kept guessing about which one will emerge the stronger.

Wrobel explores this bizarre mother-daughter relationship in chapters that alternate between each woman’s point of view, both past and present. After Patty is released, their small town’s inhabitants are amazed to hear that Rose Gold has taken her mother into her own home-and even lets her care for her newborn son. The rippling effects of Rose Gold’s horrific childhood build up over the five years she’s on her own, until she’s 23 and the need for revenge begins to take hold. Some days I felt like a vital organ was missing.” I’d had cancer scares, brain damage scares, tuberculosis scares.” Despite finally realizing that her own mother was the cause of all her suffering, Rose Gold still has ambivalent feelings about her mother’s sentencing and imprisonment: “Some days I was thrilled. The reader learns the details of what Patty did to her daughter, Rose Gold, only in flashback chapters: “By the time I was ten,” Rose Gold remembers, “I’d had ear and feeding tubes, tooth decay, and a shaved head. Wrobel instead begins her eerie tale when Patty Watts is about to be released from prison after serving five years for aggravated child abuse. Stephanie Wrobel’s compulsively readable debut, Darling Rose Gold, explores Munchausen syndrome by proxy (MSP), a psychological disorder in which a child’s caregiver, often the mother, seeks to gain attention from the medical community for made-up symptoms of the child in her care.Įarlier novels about this rare phenomenon focus on the modes of abuse the mother employs to gain attention, like starvation or putting ipecac in her child’s food to induce vomiting.

Darling rose gold by stephanie wrobel