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This book was very hard to read! I'm not sure if I've ever read a book that made me sick to my stomach as much.

That would be my only qualifier to recommending it--I just know it is going to be stuck in my head and heart for awhile in an all-consuming way that might sneak up on me in unexpected moments.

A fair warning: obviously the stuff about Rosemary's disability is upsetting and infuriating, but Rose Kennedy had obsession with her children's health that included weight, so a lot of the correspondence between children and parents talks about Rosemary trying to lose weight in order to please her father and mother and her parents often also instruct caretakers to encourage Rosemary to diet. It was secondarily upsetting to the handling of her disability, but I wasn't prepared for it at all, so I figured I would include a trigger warning here.

Larson does a good job of re centering Rosemary to the Kennedy family. That this figure, who for so long was a footnote and then cast as this tragedy looming over the family, was actually at the center of the morality, faith and public dedication that the family strove toward. The differing successes of the family achieving those goals isn't really the concern of Larson. Instead, she really does focus on Rosemary and the ripples of goodness she sent out into the world, even after so much of her life's potential was taken away from her by her father's unilateral medical decisions on her behalf.