In the Company of Crazies ***

Baskin, Nora Raleigh. In the Company of Crazies. 2006

Mia is in middle school and suddenly finds herself troubled. Her grades are slipping and she is shoplifting. Her parents send her away to a boarding school for troubled kids. The kids there, only about a dozen it seems, have various psychological diagnoses that make it hard for them to function in a regular school. They are there for a therapeutic environment.

It seems unclear to me why Mia is there. While she has had some problems, it seems that the other kids have a lot more going on that Mia. It didn't seem like Mia really needed to be pulled out of school and put in a residential facility. The other characters were a lot more interesting to me and kept me interested in reading the rest of the book, to see what they were like and what might happen to them as time went on. The ending also seemed a bit rushed to me. There didn't seem to be any real resolution to her problems, but maybe that was because she didn't really have any problems to begin with. Maybe her parents were the ones with the problem!

I would recommend this book for middle school students interested in reading about kids living in a special school.