If we could go back to Ms Vona. This is cut and paste from BN reviews. I see several key words here. Tough-love, boot camp, hardcore delinquent, witness the near murder of a counselor? I have read on this site and looked at the facility website. Are we talking about the same facility?
Library Journal
This book is both a gripping diary by an out-of-control teenager who spent a year in a tough-love wilderness boot camp and a cumbersome, disconnected autobiography. Sent to "the Village" by her father, Vona goes through different degrees of rehabilitation, some in group, some solitary, most grueling. Her peers are hardcore delinquents with backgrounds in drugs, prostitution, truancy, and abuse. Further complicating the story is the friction among Vona's father, stepmother, and mother, with whom she is allowed limited phone conversations. The diary is pretty graphic and pretty awful, with Vona witnessing the near murder of a counselor. The Village is neither praised nor condemned; some girls, like Vona, make it, and some don't. Only in the author's note at the end do readers learn that Vona is so dyslexic that she dictated most of the diary to her teacher after she left the Village a fact that should have been made clearer from the start. Perhaps a more thoughtful approach would have kept readers in the story. For larger memoir collections, though there may be demand given endorsements by novelists Jay McInerney and Bret Easton Ellis. Linda Beck, Indian Valley P.L., Telford, PA Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.
