Don't call Mia Dempsey, who narrates Jessie Ann Foley's fiery and wry You Know I'm No Good, a troubled teen: "I wish I were troubled. Instead, what I am is enraged." Okay, but Mia's father and stepmother are still going with "troubled": they've uprooted Mia from her life in Chicago and enrolled her at Minnesota's Red Oak Academy, which bills itself as a "therapeutic boarding school for troubled teenage girls."
Mia is here because she punched her stepmother in the face, but "if you'd heard what she said to me, you would agree that she completely deserved it." Readers can decide for themselves as the novel plays out, often in Mia's Red Oak therapist's office. Mia has been in therapy before--her mother died when she was three--and is fully expecting her new shrink to agree with all the others, that she acts out because she "has a mother-shaped void in my life, which I'm trying to numb with drugs or fill with boys." But might there be more to it?
You Know I'm No Good proceeds like a character study until around the book's midpoint, when a new student comes to Red Oak and sets off a series of calamities. While Mia's emotions follow something of a predictable arc, the book's plot sure doesn't. Foley (Sorry for Your Loss; The Carnival at Bray) delivers a raw-nerve-like story that hammers away at questions about heredity, legacy and accountability, and readers will appreciate Mia's efforts to storm her way to answers. --Nell Beram, freelance writer and YA author