YMMV / Where Are the Children?

• And You Thought It Would Fail: Mary Higgins Clark's agent thought the manuscript was great, but two publishers they submitted it to turned it down because they worried the subject matter - involving child murder and children being kidnapped by a sexual predator - would be too dark and off-putting to women readers. The author stated in a foreword in the 1998 edition that although there were no graphic scenes of child abuse in the book, the subject was still regarded as highly taboo in the 1970s, so some publishers balked at even a hint of such topics. Publisher Simon & Schuster did take a chance on it and the novel proved to be a bestseller, remaining one of Higgins Clark's most popular books for decades afterwards (it also received a movie adaptation).
• Harsher in Hindsight: It's made clear one of the reasons people believed Nancy was guilty of murdering her children was because she didn't react to her children's deaths the way they thought she 'should' (which could actually be attributed to shock and exhaustion), with there also being judgemental and inaccurate assumptions on her appearance and lifestyle. Just five years after the book was published, a real-life tragedy occurred with several similarities when Lindy Chamberlain was wrongly accused of murdering her baby daughter in 1980, with it eventually being confirmed the baby was killed by a dingo.

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