Policemen and doctors will tell you they know when it’s a full moon, because the A&E units fill up more quickly than on other nights of the month. Sometimes I would think the same was true of Rankeillor: there was a trigger of some kind — invisible to adults but perfectly tangible to the kids — which would make them all go nuts for a day or two each month; or week, if we were really unlucky. — Natalie Haynes, The Furies Natalie Haynes‘s exciting first novel, The Furies (St. Martin’s Press, 2014), is a five-act tragedy-thriller set in a pupil referral unit in Edinburgh. Alex Morris is a young theater director who has fled to Scotland following a mysterious personal tragedy, leaving behind directorial duties at the Royal Court in London and what could have been a brilliant career. Taking up an offer from her old drama teacher at university, Alex finds herself in the basement of “the Unit” on Rankeillor Street, where she conducts drama therapy classes with children who have been withdrawn from other schools because of their behavioral problems. She’s drawn to one class in particular, a group of five mismatched teenagers who overcome their initial distrust of […]