So, we start the book proper with our main character, Luce, arriving late for orientation at her new reform school.

Late.  At her new…reform…  Wait.  Reform school is for kids who have behavioral problems and need special, corrective attention.  Supervision and schedules are a big part of that.  Not just for the sake of reforming them, but also because you’ve got a bunch of kids with behavior problems running around and you need to keep an eye on them to make sure no one gets shanked.  Yet Luce can saunter on in any time she pleases and skip the majority of the orientation lecture?

Is this one of those “reform” schools where parents pay a bunch of money to have their kids dumped somewhere out of sight and the staff says “yeah, we’ll fix them” with a wink and nod?

Woman, Luce decided, studying the attendant. No man would be catty enough to say all that in such a saccharine tone of voice.

Wow.  So you’re going to be one those kinds of books, I see.

So, Luce has her first day at the “dump your kids” school a month after the start of term, and there are three other kids there having their first day as well, two boys and one girl.

The girl seemed easy enough to figure out, blond and Neutrogena-commercial pretty, with pastel pink manicured nails that matched her plastic binder.

Wow, you hit the ground running and aren’t even going to take a breather, are you, book?  Please, tell us, what did you figure out about Gabbe here other than her preferred color of nail polish?

Luce also dutifully notes for us that one of the boys is plain looking, and the other is YA Bad Boy Pretty.  

Those eyes were intense, and alluring, and, well, a little bit disarming.

Magic eyes and everything.  

Couldn’t you go for something just a little bit original book?  You wouldn’t have to go far, I’d settle for some magic eyelashes.  

The attendant tells the other kids that they can dump their contraband and then head on over to the gym to meet their student guides.  Because, you know, it’s a “reform” school, not a reform school, so you can totally trust the students to voluntarily dump all their hazardous items.

The girl pulled out a three-inch pink Swiss Army knife. The green-eyed guy reluctantly dumped a can of spray paint and a box cutter. Even the hapless Todd let loose several books of matches and a small container of lighter fluid.

I can only assume that the kids are picking the most cliched of items to dump publicly, to placate the staff, so that no one will get suspicious and find the cocaine stashed in their shoes.

You know, I can’t help but compare this scene to my first day in basic training.  They didn’t let us volunteer our stuff.  They made us dump out or bags and went through everything one item at a time, after making us change into issued clothing that didn’t have pockets.  And that was for people who volunteered to be there, not kids forced to go there because they’d already shown a tendency to fuck authority.

(We had to give up astringents!  We couldn’t keep the pointy files on our nail clippers!  And the best this book can come up with is…cans of spray paint?)

Luce has a momentary panic attack when she realizes she has to give up her cell phone, because she has a best friend from her old school she wanted to keep up with.

Pretty Bad Boy tries to offer to be Luce’s student guide, but apparently he got in trouble and that’s why he’s being treated as a new student, so he can’t be anyone’s guide.

Oh, right, at the start of the chapter we got this:

“So remember, it’s meds, beds, and reds,”

And then an explanation of where to go to drop off your medication.

“Beds.” She pointed out the west-facing window to a distant cinder-block building.

Um…yes?  And?  There’s no explanation there, just pointing to the dormitory so that Luce can prattle on for a while about how ugly it is.

What “it’s” was the woman referring to?  She says it like a mantra, like it’s three things people need to remember the most, but how does “beds” fit in there except as an abbreviated tour?

This place looked like a maximum-security prison.

Oh.  Oh, sweetie.  Not even close.

Hm, I guess a lot of this maudlin attitude can be blamed on the fact that she’s a teenager and she doesn’t want to be here.  That’s fine.  But it would be up to the book to still present the place as realistic, in spite of MC thoughts to the contrary, and I just don’t have high hopes for that happening.

“Cameras?”

“Very good,” the attendant said, voice dripping condescension. “We make them obvious in order to remind you. All the time, everywhere, we’re watching you. So don’t screw up—that is, if you can help yourself.”

Wow.  Just…wow.  That’s got to be the worst system of supervision ever.  Even if you have someone watching the cameras all the time, if one student is about to throttle another student, no one’s going to get there on time to stop it from happening.  I mean, it’s better than nothing, but cameras really should be a supplement to physical presence.

BTW, the writing in this is really irritating.  All through the chapter, there’s been extraneous narration dumping background information on us.  I haven’t mentioned most of it, because it’s stuff like how she met her last friend and things her parents said before dropping her off.  I’m not really sure how I feel about it, because I want to say that it’s okay to just tell your readers things sometimes.  But this book dumps so much on us, and all of it stuff I don’t care in the least about.  I can’t tell if it’s annoying because it’s excessive, or if it’s annoying because I just find the subject matter annoying.

We do finally get some relevant bit of background: last summer her boyfriend died in a fire that they were both in, and she doesn’t remember what happened.

But now, every rule and regulation at Sword & Cross seemed to work against that notion, seemed to suggest that she was, in fact, dangerous and needed to be controlled.

You’ve heard exactly one rule so far: no contraband.  “Cameras” isn’t a rule.  This place is, so far, more relaxed than your average high school.

She’d been sent here because of the suspicious death of the guy she’d been crazy about

This is kind of sketchy.  Is there any proof that she was responsible?  Like…any?  They were in a cabin, there was a fire…okay, c’mon Luce, fires are a thing that happen, so do they suspect it was arson?  Why not say as much, instead of focusing on the fact that you don’t remember it, since that’s not at all an uncommon reaction to a traumatic event.

“Okay, orientation’s over,” the attendant said. “You’re on your own now. Here’s a map if you need to find anything else.”

I just cannot get over how much this place sucks.  I mean, even for dump-your-kids school, this is a ridiculous lack of structure and information for a new student.  I got a better orientation than this when I switch from private to public school.

When you can’t do better than an overcrowded public school, step away from the keyboard and try again.

A new girl named Arriane shows up to act…well, much like a teenager.

“Ooooooh,” the girl taunted in a ghost-story-telling voice, dancing around Luce in a circle. “The reds are watching youuuu.” […] She mimed a jerking-off motion at the attendant, then stared at Luce, daring her to be offended.

But that won’t stop the text from calling her “crazy.”

Arriane gets assigned to show her around the place.  The Pretty Bad Boy from before comes back just long enough to get a name – Cam – before it’s off for tour time.  The whole place is, of course, dismally bleak and ugly.

Arriane immediately veered right off the path and led Luce to the field, sitting her down on top of one of the waterlogged wooden bleachers.

Aaaaaand that’s why you don’t let random students at a school for kids with behavior problems conduct the tours.  Maybe they can earn it, like a mark of trust from the staff, Arriane was just picked because she was around, so of course this happens.

Arriane is after gossip, and she asks Luce what landed her at this school.  Which prompts Luce to ruminate on a long backstory, leaving the impression that she’s just staring off into space while Arriane waits for an answer.

We find out that Luce has weird shadows that have followed her around her whole life, which only she can see, so as a child her parents were very concerned about these visual and auditory hallucinations she’s been having.

and then therapy, and then more therapy, and finally the prescription for anti-psychotic medication.

…she was seven.

SEVEN.

YOU DO NOT GIVE ANTI-PSYCHOTICS TO A SEVEN YEAR OLD.

YOU DO NOT GIVE ANTI-PSYCHOTICS TO A RATIONAL PERSON WHO DOESN’T NEED THEM IN ORDER TO FUNCTION.

AND IT NEEDS TO BE SAID AGAIN, YOU DO NOT GIVE ANTI-PSYCHOTICS TO A SEVEN YEAR OLD.

Here, check out this list of ‘awesome’ side effects you can get from those pills.  And that’s when they’re working correctly.  On someone who needs them.  Give those things to a person who is neurologically healthy, and they’ll deteriorate rapidly.  Because, again, those pills are supposed to change your brain chemistry, and if you chemistry was already balanced, then fiddling with it will fuck you up.

AND YOU DON’T GIVE THEM TO CHILDREN, BECAUSE CHILDREN ARE STILL DEVELOPING AND SCREWING WITH THEIR BRAINS AT THAT AGE WILL CAUSE DAMAGE.

Also, there is no need in this case.  Luce tells us that she just told people she saw shadow monsters.  She didn’t hide from them, or do things they told her, or interact with them except to note their existence.  You don’t need to drug people who are perfectly rational and can tell the difference between ‘things only I see’ and ‘things everyone can see.’  The reason to correct hallucinations is because they often always come with a host of other side effects, like paranoia that makes you believe the voice whispering in your ear telling you the postman is part of a plot against you.  The reason to correct hallucinations is because they interfere with a person’s life.  (And since they most of the time do, on account of all those other associated problems, the fact that a rational person is having them should throw up red flags for any competent doctor.)  If they aren’t interfering, there’s no reason to put them on drugs that are going to screw their health like a jackhammer.

I have seen this trope too often in these paranormal books, and it needs to stop.  Serious drugs are not to be handed out like fucking candy to give your MC some extra angst.  They’re not.  Stop it right now.  And stop throwing out trendy mental disorders, too.  Those things have diagnostic criteria, and only a criminally bad psychiatrist would put a child whose only symptom is “seeing imaginary monsters” on liver-killing drugs.

Back to the horrendous book that I hate that has chapters that are too long.  By age 14, Luce had started refusing meds and pretending that her “hallucinations” had stopped.

Apparently Arriane got bored during all that, because her original question goes unanswered and they switch to cutting Arriane’s hair to be short like Luce’s.  Arriane has scars on the back of her neck that she doesn’t talk about.

With that multi-page diversion out of the way, we finally get on to the actual tour, which is really just more complaining about how ugly the place is.  Did you get it yet?  Don’t worry; I’m sure Luce will remind you a few more times.

“Fair warning,” Arriane continued. “You’re going to hate the classes here. You wouldn’t be human if you didn’t.”

“Why? What’s so bad about them?” Luce asked. Maybe Arriane just didn’t like school in general. […]

“The classes here are soulless,” Arriane said. “Worse, they’ll strip you of your soul. […]”

That didn’t sound promising

…that sounds exactly like what a person who “didn’t like school in general” would say.  She didn’t offer any concrete information there, just hyperbole and whining.

“And you’ll want to steer clear of the hard cases.”

“Hard cases?”

“The kids with the wristband tracking devices,” Arriane said. “About a third of the student body.”

Yeah, I’m sure those kids are totally deterred by all the inanimate cameras around.

Turns out Arriane is one of the wristband-wearing kids.  And they let her wander off with a new student, unsupervised, supposedly on camera but allowed to sit in a field doing nothing for some reason.

There’s an old civil-war era cemetery on the grounds.  Ooo, spooky.

it was only after a really big pharmapalooza.”

Now, that was a word Luce recognized.

“Aha!” Arriane laughed. “I just saw a light go on up there. So somebody is home. Well, Luce, my dear, you may have gone to boarding school parties, but you’ve never seen a throw-down like reform school kids do it.”

There is no supervision at this school.  Luce, your parents abandoned you to a dumping grounds.  Sorry.

“Rule number two—don’t listen to me!” Arriane laughed, shaking her head. “I’m certifiably insane!”

There is just absolutely nothing about Arriane that makes me think she’s actually ill.  At every turn, she reads like a teenager who’s trying a bit too hard to be “quirky” and “random” because that’s what teens think counts as humor at that age. (Not meaning to judge; I went through that stage, too.  It’s a learning process.  But still, she’s not crazy.)

Then it’s time to go to class, and Luce gets to see the rest of the student body all milling around before the bell rings.  She lists off all the cliques, and then Other YA Pretty Boy shows up, and of course Luce is in rapture staring at him and his prettiness.

And for a split second, Luce saw a flashing image of herself folded into those arms. She shook her head, but the vision stayed so clear that she almost took off toward him.

Now here’s an interesting thing.  Luce clearly is remembering her past lives of running into this guy before (let’s not kid like we can’t figure out they’re the guy and gal from the prologue).  So she feels drawn him, but only because she’s been drawn him before.  She falls for him because her past life told her to, but in her past life, presumably it worked the same, and all the times before that.  It’s weird kind of circular event where it happens only because it happened before.

That could be really fun to play with.  If anyone wants to run with that, since I doubt it’ll play out like that in this book.

Luce and Arriane gossip some about Daniel (Pretty Boy), and then Daniel notices her and looks surprised.

She realized they were still locking eyes when Daniel flashed her a smile. A jet of warmth shot through her and she had to grip the bench for support. She felt her lips pull up in a smile back at him

Really, is anyone else getting mind control vibes from this?

Daniel flips her off and she gasps like a delicate little flower that’s never seen a middle finger before.

And that’s the end of that.  God, these chapters are monster long.