Sisters in Sanity, by Gayle Forman
Forman, Gayle (2007). Sisters in Sanity. NY: HarperTeen (Harper Collins). 290 pages.
On the road to meet the rest of the family at the Grand Canyon, fifteen-year-old Brit’s father makes an unexpected detour at Red Rock, a girl’s school he thinks his punk rock guitar-playing daughter should “take a look” at. Little does Brit know that this school visit is really a ruse: within minutes of approaching the school, administrative thugs remove Brit from the car and “register” her for Red Rock’s boot camp rehabilitation program. While Brit maintains that her new stepmother is behind the strong-arm treatment and forced incarceration, an increasingly persistent worry clouds her reasoning: does her father believe that Brit, like her birth mother who succumbed to paranoid schizophrenia, is on her way to mental illness as well?
Much of the novel reads as you would expect: boarding school/prison girls/boot camp exploitation. Brit manages to forge a friendship with a small group of girls who meet in secret and call themselves the “Sisters in Sanity” and the gang vows to watch each others’ backs at the group shaming/therapy sessions. Brit even manages to escape the facility and play a show with her band (who happen to be touring in the area), after which she actually returns to Red Rock.
There are two ways a story like this can go: you can either camp it up super hardcore, or you can invest the narrative in the dirty and depressingly regular details of the characters’ controlled lives. Sadly, Sisters in Sanity does neither. Once Brit gets settled, the “Sisters” get involved in a plot to expose the school and the novel concludes in a predictably fairy-tale-like manner. While I have nothing against fairy tales or predictability, I wonder when teen boot camp private schools became an appropriate setting for high school social fantasy?