The Castle School (for Troubled Girls) by Alyssa Sheinmel

“You scared me. I’d never seen that much blood.”
“People get too freaked out by blood. What’s the big deal? We all have it.”
“Yeah, but most of us try to keep as much of it as possible inside of us.”
When Moira Dreyfuss's parents announce that they're sending her to boarding school, Moira isn't fooled. She knows her parents are punishing her; she's been too much trouble since her best friend Nathan died―and for a while before that. At the Castle School, isolated from the rest of the world, Moira will be expected to pour her heart out to the strange headmaster, Dr. Prince. But she isn't interested in getting over Nathan's death, or befriending her fellow students.
On her first night there, Moira hears distant music. On her second, she discovers the lock on her window is broken. On her third, she and her roommate venture outside...and learn that they're not so isolated after all. There's another, very different, Castle School nearby―this one filled with boys whose parents sent them away, too.
Moira knows something isn't right about the Castle School―about either of them. But uncovering the truth behind the schools' secrets may force Moira to confront why she was sent away in the first place.

Alyssa Sheinmel has a very niche style. I first encountered it in A Danger to Herself and Others, and I saw it once again with The Castle School (for Troubled Girls). She delves deeply into the mind of, you guessed it, troubled girls.
Most of the time, when you read a book about a young woman being labelled as difficult and being institutionalized, you expect her to be falsely accused. You expect that society has labelled her as crazy simply because she didn’t fit the mold. And history would agree; for example, the Salem Witch Trials. This idea of a young woman desperately fighting the system is thrilling and vindictive. Yet, Alyssa Sheinmel never takes this easy route. She shows us real girls with real mental illnesses, and the struggles that they go through. Her stories show us that accepting your problems is the first step to solving them. She builds trust in the system, rather than feeding the idea of crazy scientists and evil doctors. There is not big reveal, or dramatic plot twist. Her stories are real and they aren’t sensationalized, which is why they can feel a bit anticlimactic at first. But mental illness isn’t something that can be conquered in a day, or even a year. It’s a long, slow, often bitter process. 

I did, however, find this more satisfying than A Danger to Herself and Others, possibly because Moira wasn't locked up in a cell. Moira isn't kept in solitary confinement; she's at a posh boarding school in a castle where she's served delicious food and has ample leisure time.
The ensemble cast of The Castle School also added to its charm, and the way that Alyssa Sheinmel explained each of their illnesses was very insightful. Their “disorders” were much harder to brush off as “bad decisions” once we got a look into their mindset. Overall, The Castle School serves us a protagonist who barges in with conspiracy theories and indignation, only to emerge as a wiser and kinder soul on the path to recovery. Maybe it’s presumptuous, but I think the readers of the book might have a similar journey.