In the Company of Crazies -- Nora Raleigh Baskin

Everything was pretty okay in Mia Singer’s life until middle school.  Then she dropped off the honor roll and stopped hanging out with her friends.  She started skipping school and developed a shoplifting problem.  Her parents argued all the time, trying to decide what to do about her.

After a while, she got tired of teetering on the edge of becoming a juvenile delinquent and decided to get her life back on track.

Before she could, a classmate of hers was killed in a freak car accident.  The tragedy put Mia over the edge:

It wasn’t just the shoplifting that got me sent away, but funny it would turn out to be the Mountain Laurel School for Alternative Education. Because when my mother searched Mountain Laurel on the Internet and found out that it had once been categorized as a school for “emotionally disturbed adolescent boys” she was a little hesitant, to put it mildly.

Well, forget for a minute that I wasn’t a boy—I was an adolescent, I’m often accused of being too emotional and my parents are completely disturbed.  So put it all together and you have a perfect match. But did it really matter at that point anyway?

Fans of the group-home aspect of Last Chance Texaco will probably enjoy In the Company of Crazies.  Mia’s narration (I loved her voice, by the way -- she frequently made me smile.) is interspersed with brief entries and doodles from her Mountain Laurel journal.  The ending felt rushed to me, but other than that, I have no complaints.  It’s a mostly quiet and introspective book -- there is plenty of yelling, but not a lot of action -- about Mia’s transformation back to her own brand of normalcy and about the relationships between the people at Mountain Laurel.