Wild Thing

Fifteen-year-old varsity cheerleader Alysia Jayne, a beautiful California blonde with the lithe body of an Olympic gymnast, is in an escalating spiral of drug abuse, truancy and deception. One morning in 2003, she is roused from her bed by strangers, handcuffed, and rushed across the Mexican border. Here, she is incarcerated in a disciplinary school for delinquents, called Casa by the Sea, hidden behind whitewashed walls near the resort town of Ensenada. For the next six weeks, she undergoes a brutal treatment right out of "A Clockwork Orange", designed to crush the spirit and self-confidence of its young inmates. Growing rumors of abuse and violence at the Casa facility soon prompt a full-scale raid by the Mexican Federales and the FBI, an event that forces Alysia to acknowledge the still precarious fragility of her sense of self. She voluntarily submits to another severe treatment program at Ivy Ridge Academy in Upstate New York. Clinging to her tenuous relationship with other girls in the program (though forbidden to speak), Alysia gradually develops the courage to confront the roots of her destructive behavior, and win her way back into the loving arms of her family. Candid, humorous and shocking at times, "Wild Thing" is a remarkably mature memoir of a teenager lost in the temptations of America's public schools.