Silent Cry

SYNOPSIS

In disgrace, Nancy Walden arrives from New York mid-year at an elite girls’ boarding school near New Haven, run by a puritanical headmistress. At the mercy of a predatory and fanatical house mother on the corridor where she lives with five other seniors, Nancy experiences a confusing world of sexual longing, raw alliances and shattering events that change her life forever. Written with touches of humor, Silent Cry places these girls under the repressive conventions of the 1950s as Nancy struggles toward forging new friendships and finding her identity. A roommate’s secret love affair, lurking perversion and finally a murder, lead to the collapse of Winthrop Academy and Nancy’s recognition that her life is of value to herself and others.

REVIEW

“Silent Cry pulled me headlong into the hothouse atmosphere of a girls’ boarding school in the late 1950s, where exterior decorum encases lives that are anything but calm. Pain, insecurity, longing, and several kinds of love build to a breaking point as the story unfolds. Julie Bigg Veazey has created characters worth caring about and has entwined them in a plot that sizzles.”

Note
Although Julie Bigg Veazey attended all-girls’ boarding schools in the 1950s, the decade in which this mainstream, memoir-driven story is set, Silent Cry is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.