The Crazy School

Author Cornelia Read tells this story of teacher Madeline Dare, who unearths a conspiracy among her fellow teachers at a school for troubled youth. It's a dark account of an authoritarian headmaster and the murder of a young couple by poison. Madeline herself is accused of the crime, a development that forces her to join forces with the school's most rebellious students to identify the real perpetrators. Hillary Huber carries out the reading at a tortoise pace. While her delivery is clear, it sprawls on and on, emphasizing every word and pulling the energy out of what could have been a captivating story. The result is a poor listening experience. L.B. (c) AudioFile 2008, Portland, Maine

October 15, 2007
At the start of Edgar-finalist Read’s gutsy second Madeline Dare novel (after 2006’s A Field of Darkness
), Dare, a 26-year-old former debutante, takes a job in the fall of 1989 as a history teacher at Santangelo Academy, an unorthodox “therapeutic boarding school” in western Massachusetts dominated by its authoritarian cape-wearing headmaster, David Santangelo. When a student, Mooney LeChance, reveals that his girlfriend, Fay Perry, is pregnant, Dare keeps Mooney’s secret while the couple is confined to “the Farm,” a punishment dorm in the woods. The book’s first half focuses on character—the woefully misguided souls who teach at Santangelo, the students in all their dysfunctional glory—but the action picks up when Mooney and Fay die from drinking poisoned punch after a birthday party at the Farm, and Dare is arrested for her role in preparing the fatal beverage. While some characters, like the social-climbing parents who drop in between vacations, verge on stereotype, Read graphically depicts the depressing underside of a supposedly elite private school.