So let's talk about expectations versus reality a little bit. I expected this book to be a dual account by a mother and daughter about their relationship and the daughter's drug addiction/rehabilitation. It was not so much that. The drug addition aspect was a poor assumption on my fault because the synopsis mentions drugs and bootcamp schools. It's not very much about drugs. Mia used them, but it doesn't talk very much about addiction so I don't know if she even was an addict or just a casual user. It's honestly not even much of a dual account. This book is clearly written by the mother. Mia has sections, but for the most part those sections are pretty short and stream of conscious. They seemed like they only existed out of necessity because this book couldn't really exist without them. The mother's perspective was the main focus of the story and the driving force, and a big disappointment to me because I was much more interested in the daughter's experience.

Now getting into the actual book itself, the way it started and the way the synopsis was described immediately made me feel lied to. Mia is described as happy and well adjusted and normal, nothing wrong in her life. When she runs away the first time, the mother expresses shock and says she could never have seen it coming. It was so unlike her daughter. And then we cut back a little in time and find out Mia had started cutting months before, become withdrawn, started acting different and her mother put her in therapy because of it. And as a child, she'd been sexually abused by her biological father. The mother says a few pages in that nothing even hinted that she would run away and she was happy. Even assuming Mia kept other secrets, that list is just the stuff her mother knew about. And you had no idea something was wrong? Even though she was self harming and withdrawn and you were concerned enough to force her into therapy? It felt like an utter betrayal of trust as a reader because it was so blatantly not true.

I really hated the mother. The book seemed constantly full of her intentionally doing and saying awful things to and about her daughter. She suspected her husband was going to sexually abuse her daughter at some point, but never even tried to get her daughter away from him until after the abuse had happened. She didn't keep her daughter in therapy regularly through childhood despite being warned by therapists that Mia would need it. She called Mia's clothes disgusting and for druggies. Said public schools were for gangbangers and slutty girls (referring to children???). She, at different points, referred to her fifteen year old daughter as a bitch and a whore. I felt disgusted reading the way she described her own child, and I can't imagine her daughter reading this.

The behavioral modification "school" Mia was sent to was shut down for child abuse while she was there. It was the second time the owners had one of their facilities shut down for child abuse (in two different countries). It seems questionable at best to send your vulnerable kid to a reform school when the owners have already been shut down for child abuse once. Mia and her mother swear up and down it was a great experience, but the way they describe it, it sounds abusive. At one point while driving away, Mia comments that she hadn't seen the moon in six months. When a driver taking them to a different school says she can't sleep in the van, she stays awake for hours in the middle of the night despite being jetlagged and traveling for days and being desperately tired. Because she's used to obeying orders like that.

If it helped her, if she's happier now, I'm glad. But if you look up some of the "schools" she attended, there are tons of testimonials of abuse. It's hard to take much seriously in this book when they completely disregarded all of that as lies. I hope Mia is doing a lot better now, but I thought this book was awful. I thought her mother was awful. I couldn't ever recommend this.