In the Company of Crazies (review)

Seventh-grader Mia rebels against her mother's expectations for academic success, her grades decline and she develops a shoplifting habit, leading to mounting friction with her parents that results in her being sent to Mountain Laurel, a boarding school for emotionally troubled boys that is now opening its doors to female students. There Mia undergoes requisite teasing as the only girl, but it's good-natured; the boys mostly needle one other, and Mia soon grows fascinated by them, especially Drew, a brooding boy with a startling artistic talent. Mia's stint at Mountain Laurel alternates with flashbacks that reveal the depth of Mia's mother's investment in her academic and personal success and the damage it has done to their relationship, as well as Mia's disquietude about a classmate's death. The oddity of being a female student among a group of boys with varying degrees of emotional and social capacity is underplayed in favor of highlighting Mia's emotional landscape, as she slowly begins to understand her troubled relationship with her mother and processes her bereavement. Spot art consists of doodles representing Mia's own drawings, which intertwine with the main narrative. This relatively gentle treatment of a troubled girl's emotional journey is gracefully told; though it raises some nagging questions about why Mia was admitted to Mountain Laurel, they are also in some sense beside the point of her journey, in which she must not only listen to others but learn to listen to herself.