Viola is a fourteen year old native New Yorker. She's used to following her documentary producing parents all over the world. But when they sign up for an assignment in Afganistan, they decide it's too dangerous for her and enroll her in an all girl boarding school in Indiana. Viola's determined to hate every minute of it. But it's hard to hate girls who seem to understand you so well, or the boys at the neighbouring academy...or the chance to create her very first movie...
Viola walks the fine line between being whiny - there are a couple of times you want to shake her, but they pass quickly - and being too squeaky clean to be believable. Any teenage girl in her place has a right to a little self pity, but she does shake herself out of it when she learns that her interests can apply and that she can contribute to this community. Of course, the boys at the neighbouring school help with that, as does the film competition that draws all her new friends together.
It's not a perfectly happy ending, but it is realistic, and you feel that Viola has learned and grown...which is, after all, the point of boarding school.
'When I go up for a part, sometimes I'm too tall or too thin, or too this or too that, or not enough or way, way too much. The goddamned theater! You can't please them! I have to live with being judged on everything from the credits on my résumé to the size of my ankles! But you - you are not judged, and you are not dismissed. You are the first thought in your mother's and father's mind in the morning and their last one before sleep.'
'Did they tell you that?'
'No. But I'm a mother. And that's just how it goes.'
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