Cut

As an elective mute, Callie is able to observe and record information about her fellow ‘guests’ in the residential treatment facility they have grimly re-christened as ‘Sick Minds’. Here, the emphasis is on self-help and when Callie seems to be making no progress she is told she may have to leave.

Spurred on by the thought of losing her security – albeit temporary and illusory – Callie gradually begins to talk and reveals the family tensions and the needless grief-stricken blame at her part in her brother’s death. As a child, Callie has never considered her parents’ fallibility and this chink in the parental armour is one of the reasons for her retreat from the world.

There are shades here of Robert Cormier’s exquisite novel The Bumblebee Flies Anyway – the supportive claustrophobia of the clinic, the painful innocence of young minds damaged by society’s inadequacies, the reader’s guilt at being a member of a society which is as often dysfunctional as it is supportive. McCormick’s novel works because it rings true, delivering a warning about how we treat our young people which we cannot afford to ignore.