Review by Booklist Review
Bustle entertainment editor Leach embarked on this memoir to help her process her sorrow over the untimely deaths of three young women, one of whom was a beloved childhood friend and the others various acquaintances. More of a witness than a participant, the author examines the three women's privileged backgrounds, drawing comparisons with her similar upbringing. By crafting reenactments based on interviews, recollections, and her own experiences, Leach depicts a toxic suburban environment destined to ensnare vulnerable teens. She implicates detrimental media influences, easy access to substances, misguided parenting, and lack of consequences as contributors to the ruination of the three "Elissas." What begins as an intimate memorial grows to a scathing indictment of a teen rehabilitation system that the author describes as not only ineffective but deliberately predatory. Leach also provides the reader with an interesting insider perspective on social media as an aggregator and amplifier of shared grief. Leach is clearly passionate about her loss, but an overreliance on opinion, broad generalizations, and emotional conjecture conspire to undermine her objectivity, thereby sacrificing comprehensive balance.
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Bustle editor-at-large Leach debuts with a deeply personal investigation into the tragic fate of her childhood friend, Elissa, and the role the "Troubled Teen Industry" played in her death at age 18. Like the female celebrities she emulated (Paris Hilton, Kim Kardashian), Elissa was a wealthy suburban teenager who partied, drank, and cultivated a "slutty reputation" to garner popularity. During her sophomore year of high school, Elissa's parents transferred her to Arizona's Spring Ridge Academy, the first stop in a string of therapeutic boarding schools that promised to curb her troubled behavior. The reality, according to Leach, is that these unregulated, for-profit institutions prey on wealthy parents' anxieties while often exacerbating their children's problems. Drawing on interviews with parents, friends, and acquaintances, Leach recounts in often harrowing detail how Elissa and two of her classmates, Alyssa and Alissa, ended up at Ponca Pines Academy in Nebraska, and details the circumstances that would see all three die before turning 27 (Alyssa overdosed on heroin; Elissa and Alissa both succumbed to illnesses that may have been linked to their addictions). Noting that as many as 50,000 teenagers enter the Troubled Teen Industry each year, Leach also profiles activists who are fighting to uncover its abuses and incisively analyzes the "societal pressures" placed on upper-middle-class girls in America. It's a searing exposé. (June)
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Review by Library Journal Review
Bustle editor Leach's debut is an intimate picture of three friends--Elissa, Alyssa, and Alissa--and their tragic deaths before the age of 30. It is also a scathing exposé of the troubled-teen industry, a system of underregulated residential youth programs aimed at struggling teenagers. The book explains the detrimental effects that one such boarding school had on the three subjects of this book and other young women. Readers will learn that Elissa was Leach's childhood friend who became a rebellious teenager. She was sent to Ponca Pines Academy, a privately owned rehabilitation boarding center, where she met Alyssa and Alissa. Through untold hours of research and dedicated interviews with the girls' families and friends, the author recounts the struggles and trauma they endured at the school, including isolation, verbal abuse, and pseudo-scientific therapies. Each resisted the program in their own way, often with drugs, sex, and alcohol, and coping mechanisms more profound after graduating. VERDICT An intimate, moving narrative peppered with harsh statistics, love, angst, and the author's own admirable vulnerability.--Jack Phoenix
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Review by Kirkus Book Review
A Bustle entertainment editor examines the lives and deaths of three young women who were also products of therapeutic boarding schools. Rhode Island native Leach met Elissa--who would eventually befriend two girls named Alyssa and Alissa--when both were infants. Raised by suburban "parents with means and access," all four girls experimented with drinking and drugs, "rebellious behaviors that were of the socially acceptable, suburban variety--until they became something greater, more fearful." Leach would be the only one who reached age 26. Drawing on her memories and interviews with countless people involved in the girls' lives, Leach subsumed her grief into a quest to understand how she had managed to survive what the other girls did not. Like Elissa, the author fell under the spell of media stars like Paris Hilton and Nicole Ritchie, whose "rehab stints, public meltdowns, breakups and hookups" transformed them into icons of cool and, more insidiously, into models of the disordered behavior that plagued the Elissas. As a teen, the author, shy around boys, "delved in the booze," while Alyssa flaunted her sexuality and fell in love with a boy who introduced her to heroin. In high school, Leach chose to express rebellion through hipster bohemianism, and the more stubbornly defiant Elissa was sent to therapeutic boarding schools. At one of them--Ponca Pines--Elissa met Alyssa and Alissa, two hard-living girls with whom she formed the troubled triumvirate that fascinated Leach to the point of obsession. The author refrains from indicting either Ponca Pines or the "Troubled Teen Industry" for the girls' deaths, which happened after they left. Instead, she develops sensitive portraits of each girl and suggests how social pressures, combined with health and environmental factors, conspired to damage the minds and then destroy the bodies of three vulnerable young women. A poignant and heartfelt mix of sociology and memoir. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
