In spite of its relatively
short history, Santangelo Academy, the setting for Cornelia Read's second novel, The Crazy School,
leaks shadows and New England fog all over the book's narrator, Madeline Dare.
In keeping with the storied association of prep schools and murder—must
be the rage of teenage hormones, or the residuals of the days of corporal
punishment—Madeline, an unlikely detective and even less likely
high-school teacher, uncovers something weirder and more awful than she anticipated.
After Madeline's engineer
husband is laid off, she joins the staff at Santangelo, a guru-led reform
school in the Berkshires, where she has to undergo the same protracted group-talk
treatment as the disobedient, drug-addicted attendees. Between the mandatory
staff "appreciations" and the campus ban on coffee, Madeline is as miserable as
her pupils, which could be why so many of them decide to confide in her. When
tragedy strikes the campus, though, Madeline has more to overcome than her
superiors' New Age agenda and the challenges of teaching I Know Why The
Caged Bird Sings;
her ornery attitude at work makes her a police suspect and an unlikely ally to
her alienated students.
The Crazy School never reaches the gothic
depths of Read's debut novel, A Field Of Darkness, but it maintains a
similar, stubbornly deliberate pace propelled more by Madeline's ornery
disposition than by any procedural imperative. Madeline's motives to delve into
the Santangelo mystery are a little specious, but her Achilles heel is the
guilt she feels over her own unfitness for her charges' care, just as her
disappointing career as a small-town journalist in A Field Of Darkness prompted her to dig into
a long-unsolved murder. (The books are sequential, but it isn't necessary to
have read the first to enjoy the second.)
And in the end, Madeline's
dim view of her surroundings and her attendant skepticism make The Crazy
School's
conclusion, and its attendant stretches of believability, seem almost
realistic. This is no gullible Nancy Drew, and whatever damages her students have
inflicted on themselves pale in comparison to the institutional gloom she sees
enveloping them. Sounds like an ordinary case, but the company of a
chain-smoking former flower child makes the trip anything but common. —Ellen
Wernecke Grade:
B