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Library | Call Number | Status |
|---|---|---|
Searching... McMinnville Public Library | Read, C. | Searching... Unknown |
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Summary
Summary
Madeline has traded in the drudgery of living in backwoods Syracuse, New York to work as a teacher at Santangelo Academy, in the Berkshires, a boarding school for emotionally disturbed teenagers. Behind the ornate gates of the academy, she finds a disturbing realm where students and teachers must follow the Dean's bizarre therapies.
Author Notes
Cornelia Read grew up in New York, California, and Hawaii. She is a reformed debutante who currently lives in Berkeley with her husband and twin daughters. To learn more about the author, you can visit her website at www.corneliaread.com , and www.nakedauthors.com , her group blog with authors Jim Born, Paul Levine, Patty Smiley, and Jacqueline Winspear.
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
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. (Jan.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Kirkus Review
Another bitterly amusing mystery from the author of A Field of Darkness (2006). The Santangelo Academy is a school of last resort, an expensive dumping ground for addicted, addled and dangerous teenagers. Madeline Dare is almost as desperate as her students when she starts teaching there: The job that lured her husband from Syracuse to the Berkshires disappears before he even begins work, and a position teaching history is the only employment Madeline can find. She's got other, more existential issues, too--ones that some readers will recall from Madeline's first appearance in Read's debut--and the draconian therapeutic regimen at Santangelo is only exacerbating her emotional unease. Having been raised amidst the baroque self-help culture of California in the '70s, Madeline is both familiar with and deeply skeptical of the school founder's unorthodox methods. Her cynicism turns to something deeper and more terrible, though, when she suspects that the supposed suicide of two students was actually murder. Her fear and outrage intensify when she becomes a suspect. Like the many caterers, quilters and cat-lovers who inhabit mystery fiction, Madeline has a knack for amateur sleuthing, but there's nothing cozy about this novel (the violence is occasionally spectacular, and there is liberal use of the F-word). And, like the oft-imperiled heroines of romantic suspense, Madeline has a gift for getting into trouble, but Read does not use danger as an impetus for crazy sex (Madeline is securely, sedately married, and when she and her husband go to bed together, it's for sleeping). Rather, Read borrows elements from different genres to craft a strange, compelling narrative, one that frequently approaches--but never quite descends to--the excesses of melodrama. Madeline's deadpan voice, acid wit and psychological depth are the perfect counterpoint to the novel's positively Gothic plot. In her shadowed complexity and stubborn--but fragile--integrity, Madeline resembles many of the genre's most enduring protagonists. She's a great character, and her creator is a great storyteller. Caustic, gripping and distinctive--intelligent entertainment. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
*Starred Review* There's madness in western Massachusetts in Read's smart second offering starring witheringly witty ex-debutante Madeline Dare. This time around, Madeline is up to her cocked eyebrow in trouble when she takes a teaching job at cultish Santangelo Academy, a boarding school for troubled teens. At Santangelo, humiliation and harsh discipline await students and teachers who act out or misbehave. That's bad news for Madeline, whose top-two vices, coffee and cigarettes, rate high on the school's copious list of taboos. Life at Santangelo goes from unsettling to sinister after a student and his pregnant girlfriend are found dead under mysterious circumstances, and on the same night, Madeline is poisoned within an inch of her life. Soon after, a well-intentioned student comes to Madeline with news of a staff member who had both motive and means. Edgar-nominee Read (A Field of Darkness, 2006) has rendered another swiftly plotted mystery peppered with wonderful one-liners. Madeline may be the only amateur sleuth who would describe the difficulties of solving a murder as being as exhausting as trying to parse that old riddle about getting the goat and the wolf and the head of cabbage safely across some river in your too-small rowboat, only worse this time, because Kafka kept lighting the oars on fire and laughing his ass off. This series belongs on the must-read list of anyone who enjoys mystery mixed with comedy.--Block, Allison Copyright 2007 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
The shades of Frank Norris and Upton Sinclair must have been looking over Loren D. Estleman's shoulder when he wrote GAS CITY (Forge, $24.95). Set in a Midwestern metropolis that grew up around a refinery, his muscular novel initially takes a long view of the cynical bargain struck between civic leaders and organized crime - and only moves in for the kill when a key figure in this devil's dance decides to reform. Like earlier muckraking writers, Estleman is always looking for the tipping point where our frontier values of independent entrepreneurship and community justice tumble into criminality. And his characters never stop asking whether it's possible to go back and get it right. Everyone in Gas City seems to be in on the deal that keeps crime and vice confined to 10 downtown blocks, well away from the commercial and residential districts. Francis X. Russell, the corrupt chief of police, is actually best friends with the mob boss Tony Z. But when Russell's beloved wife dies, he goes into mourning for the lost ideals of the generations of immigrants who built his working-class city and resolves to make peace with his conscience. Police raids close down the most notorious criminal establishments. Illicit income dries up for gangsters and cops on the take. Fortunes shift in the coming mayoral race. But once the delicate powersharing mechanism held by Gas City's legal and illegal bosses breaks down, so does municipal order. At this point, Estleman has to ask whether one crooked cop's personal reformation is worth the chaos it causes. It's a loaded question, since the author has made individual (and perhaps national) redemption his central theme, even to the whimsical point of extending it to a serial killer known as Beaver Cleaver, who has shifted his pattern of butchery. ("My theory," a criminal profiler says, "is he's trying to cut down, like a smoker or an alcoholic tapering off his intake until he's beaten the addiction.") While this parallel plot isn't entirely integrated into the main story, it lets more raffish downtown characters into the mix, adding their irreverent voices to the higher debate over how much it profits a man to build a shining city and lose his faith in himself. Before she loses her nerve in a way that a true queen of the night (like Ruth Rendell or her alter ego, Barbara Vine) never would, Minette Walters spins a gripping tale of suspense in THE CHAMELEON'S SHADOW (Knopf, $24.95). Sticking to her habitual method of storytelling, Walters draws all eyes to Lt. Charles Acland, a 26-year-old British soldier who is gravely injured but escapes death after his armored vehicle is obliterated by terrorist bombs in Iraq. From the time he's first met, badly disfigured and sullenly silent on a hospital ward, Acland commands our attention, which only intensifies as he reveals the anger, grief, guilt and rage that torment him. Walters's portrait of this wounded soldier is so persuasively shaded that when he comes under suspicion as a serial killer we're forced to examine the existential question of whether a personality can truly be destroyed - and what that says about military combat. Unhappily, the story's sensationalism undermines this character study, while the procedural format, with its routine police work and inept cops, only distracts from the deeper issues this psychological thriller raises. The perverse tones of Madeline Dare rake their fingernails across the mental blackboard in THE CRAZY SCHOOL (Grand Central, $23.99). And how nice it is to hear that rebel voice again. After making her nervy debut in "A Field of Darkness," Cornelia Read's renegade debutante took to the hills of New England, and here she is in 1989 in the Berkshires, teaching at the Santangelo Academy, a "therapeutic boarding school" for the troubled progeny of the filthy rich. In addition to appealing to "all manner of seekers and lost boys, wild girls and pagan sprites," and those misguided souls who would teach them more practical social skills, the region also attracts a murderer who kills two students and makes the deaths look like a double suicide. Only the iconoclastic Madeline, who really cares about her vulnerable charges, is skeptical enough to see through the sham. While hardly taxing, the whodunit plot is funny and twisted, and it gives Madeline plenty of opportunities to air her caustic views on the evolutionary decline of her social class. As alluring as it is disorienting, THE RISK OF INFIDELITY INDEX (Atlantic Monthly, $22) introduces American readers to Christopher G. Moore's exotic private-eye mysteries set in Bangkok and featuring an American expatriate named Vincent Calvino. While hard-pressed to maintain his own moral ballast within this permissive society, Calvino has a sense of irony that allows him to work for ex-pat wives who want sordid proof of their husbands' infidelity in the Thai capital, which ranks No. 1 internationally as the "hub of marriage destruction." But this cynical private eye also has a streak of integrity (and a need for cash) that compels him to take up the cause of a client who was murdered when he tried to expose a case of drug piracy so farreaching it could bring down the government. Although the tone of the narrative is slightly off - the general satire seems a bit too blunt, and downright mean in its specific consideration of those expat wives - Moore's flashy style successfully captures the dizzying contradictions of this vertiginous landscape. In Loren D. Estleman's latest novel, a corrupt chief of police tries to make peace with his conscience.
Library Journal Review
Read's mystery debut, A Field of Darkness, was well received by reviewers and nominated for an Edgar Award; only a year later, she has an equally compelling new offering. This time Madeline Dare and husband Dean have relocated from Syracuse, NY, to the Berkshires as Madeline has accepted a teaching position at the Santangelo Academy, an alternative school for troubled teenagers. When the book opens, she is slowly adjusting to the quirky rules and therapy regimens required of students and teachers alike. An atmosphere of distrust is pervasive, cultivated by policies that encourage teachers to snitch on one another for such minor transgressions as smoking cigarettes or drinking coffee. Many of the students are prone to violence, and Read does a good job of projecting an air of unease, even before two of the students are murdered and Madeline's own life is threatened. Read's novel is fast-paced; once the action starts, don't even think about putting it down. The motives behind the murders are complex, and the ultimate heroes and bad guys are a total surprise. Strongly recommended for all public libraries.-Caroline Mann, Univ. of Portland Lib., OR (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.