Given her previous work, I expected Cahalan to delve further into what it means to lose one’s mind — or find it — on LSD ... The Acid Queen reveals a painfully unrealized woman, a lifelong seeker whose reliance on the I Ching marks the most visible edge of a spiritualism born of too much acid, hashish and Ritalin.
A well-wrought narrative that brings deserved attention to a lost figure in the counterculture ... Cahalan’s swift-moving biography is admiring but not uncritical, with an admonitory takeaway about both psychedelic drugs and the outlaw life.
Cahalan uses Rosemary’s stranger than fiction story to offer a vivid portrait of how flower power cracked up in the ’70s. It’s an electric account of a remarkable life and the end of an era.
