By: Léonie Rosenstiel
Publisher: Dayspring Resources
Publication Date: April 3, 2025
ISBN: 978-1962888028
Reviewed by: Ephantus Muriuki
Review Date: October 1, 2025
Léonie Rosenstiel’s They're Coming for Your Elders and Your Inheritance: Ways to Protect Your Family, Mitigate the Damage, and Change the System is one of those books whose message hits like a shock wave. Here, Rosenstiel boldly and fearlessly dedicates herself to critique the whole system of elder care, dementia, and family dynamics which she compares to a giant spider web made by a huge, venomous spider that is big enough to swallow a horse. At first, the metaphor seems excessive and melodramatic but a few pages in, it becomes clear that she means it as she recalls being caught up in a system designed to restrain, control, and consume. She lived through it, not for a month or a year, but for 14 long years, battling courts and guardians over the fate of her own widowed mother. That image of being trapped in sticky threads, pulling tighter each time she struggles, lingers and sets the tone for the nightmare in the form of a slow-motion horror movie that follows.
This book is not a neat memoir or a detached legal handbook. It is something rawer, more urgent, a mix of personal testimony, investigative journalism, and survival guide written from inside the nightmare, not after it ends. The exhaustion and anger bleed through the pages, but so does the determination. What makes the book so disturbing is how ordinary the situations sound at the start. We are shown how a family thinks they have done everything right—a will drafted, a trust established, powers of attorney signed, thinking they are safe but then an accident, an illness, or the slow creep of dementia sets in, and suddenly the paperwork doesn’t hold. Courts step in, guardians get appointed, lawyers multiply and families discover they are no longer in charge of their own loved one’s care or even their own inheritance.
Rosenstiel doesn’t just recount horror stories but she also tries to "arm" her readers. Each chapter ends with practical takeaways, questions to ask, steps to consider and which documents to review before a crisis hits. They aren’t silver bullets, but real tools that show that even small measures can help a family resist the first tug of the web, or at least see it for what it is. By the time the book closes, the feeling one experiences is both devastating and oddly grateful. Devastating, because the system she describes is chillingly effective at stripping elders of dignity and families of control, and grateful, because she lifts the curtain and forces us to look at what we might prefer not to see. The book leaves you unsettled, haunted, and unable to dismiss its warning. It isn’t just her story, but a map of what can happen to any of us, unless we pay attention now.
Quill says: They're Coming for Your Elders and Your Inheritance: Ways to Protect Your Family, Mitigate the Damage, and Change the System is not an easy read but a critical one that ably shows that odds can be beaten and that freedom can be regained. It is written by a person who was totally gagged by a judge, but who legally regained full freedom of speech and who since then, has done her best to help others avoid and/or reform this system. Its principles are bound to help many more people regain their civil rights. Read it, remember it and be vigilant, for knowledge of what lies in wait is the first line of defense in ensuring that your elders and the hard-earned inheritance stay unencumbered.
