From Publishers Weekly
To be fair, Weaver's entry into the family dysfunction/drug abuse/road to recovery memoir pool is engaging on a voyeuristic level; unfortunately, insanity and addiction have been staples of the genre since The Bell Jar, and Weaver's doesn't contribute much to the tradition. Beginning with her privileged New York-Connecticut upbringing, Weaver gives her girlhood self a hard-to-swallow existentialist streak, as in her description of a Fifth Avenue Christmas party: "The nothingness of it all hit me as I stood alone in the corner... like a painting covered in too much varnish, the top layer began to peel away, and in a flash I saw the dark and frightening emptiness that lay below the color." Faced with all that emptiness, wealth and domestic instability (alcoholic mother, distant father), Weaver drinks, smokes pot and gets kicked out of prestigious Spence School. Eventually she ends up at $100,000-a-year rehab boarding school Cascade, which turns out to be more cult than cure. After graduation, Weaver resorts to old tricks, drugging and slumming through New York's Lower East Side, discovering Ketamine and getting arrested on the road to redemption. Though there's plenty of honesty here, and an interesting look inside the bizarre world of high-end juvenile rehab, too much of the action and self-reflection are both familiar and overwrought.
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From Booklist
Weaver's uneven memoir recounts how a wealthy Manhattan upbringing led a pretty young girl to a life of substance abuse and irresponsible sex. "What is wrong with you?" Weaver's alcoholic mother repeatedly asks her. (Her emotionally bankrupt father prefers the silent treatment.) Expelled from multiple prep schools, Weaver is finally shipped off by her parents to Cascade, a now-defunct high school and therapeutic rehabilitation center in the remote northern California mountains near the Oregon border. The place resembles a cult, with emotionally abusive teachers who dress alike and spout the same psychobabble. "I want you to peel back your flesh and show me the ugliest part of your soul!" shrieks one staff member during a group therapy session. After graduation, life outside Cascade's cocoon proves precarious for Weaver, who soon finds herself succumbing to the bad behaviors she worked so hard to overcome. Weaver's account of her transgressions is tiresome at times, resulting in a narrative that's consistently disturbing but not always engaging. Block, Allison