| Scared Kids, Scary Adults, Crazy Read |
July 26, 2010
The Crazy School by Cornelia Read is a crazy read. Read is much funnier than I am (witness previous sentence), but her humor is a dark humor, and she uses that humor to write a book that is alternately loopy, harrowing, funny or sad, and always unpredictable. Read builds her suspenseful story around intriguing characters and a heart-wrenching, mind-spinning plot of what happens when desperate people turn to desperate measures. Wherever despair lurks, charlatans flourish, offering solutions that provide no benefit other than to the charlatans' pockets (or beds). Just because the charlatans might be insane (egomaniacs, control freaks, narcissists) doesn't mean they aren't evil as well. Can a good but desperate person beat insane and determined evil? Maybe not -- but a good person, only slightly off kilter and very, very fed-up-with-it-all person can beat the bad guys. And so enters Madeline Dare.
Dare was introduced in Read's first novel, A Field of Darkness, which was nominated for an Edgar award, and Read has followed through with more great Madeline Dare. Madeline is a woman cynical beyond her years yet still young enough to believe she can make a difference in the world. In The Crazy School, she's joined the faculty of an isolated and expensive private high school for troubled adolescents. Some of the kids have been sent by parents who truly care but have reached the end of their ropes, while other kids have been shuttled off to the school to be placed out of the way, paid for and then forgotten. Madeline cares about all of her students, especially as she begins to understand that the methods employed by founder and leader David Santangelo are neither helpful nor compassionate, but are instead cruel, manipulative, and maybe even evil.
Read, through her character Madeline, explores the domino effect of damages caused when megalomaniacs gain control over people and money. The victims are not always good or innocent but they are vulnerable. In Madeline's eyes, kids are vulnerable no matter how delinquent, and she is their protector. As the bone-chilling winter settles in to the Berkshires, chills of the spine also seep in, as strange and creepy things begin happening on campus. Madeline begins to realize that more than just the students' mental health is at stake - their lives are in danger, and so is hers.
I liked The Crazy School for its unpredictable and engaging plot and for its background of a cold winter in the Berkshires, for its history lesson on manipulative gurus through the ages and its compassionate portrayal of teen angst. But what I liked most of all was its heroine, Madeline Dare. Madeline is caustic, funny, angry, and brave, and carries buried deep within herself a true heart of gold. Madeline is already off on a new adventure in Read's latest novel, Invisible Boy. I hope it is another seriously moving but also darkly funny farce of good versus evil, where the good guys do get the last word and Madeline survives, heart and soul intact.
|
|