Hidden deep inside the Berkshire hills, Four Corners Academy is infamous for being the place where children are sent when they do not fit in anywhere else. Those who are sent there know that this is the last school they will be boarded at, that there are no more alternatives--not even military school will take an expelled student from 4C. For many, it heralds the beginning of a bleak life, for others, just another signpost within a life already damned, and for the rest, the last stop on the road altogether.
The new principal, a young woman not too long out of Columbia, has the daunting task of trying to bring the school around, to bring hope and promise back to the children now in her care. The school's trustees, Guy Royal and Stuart James, want her to fail; many of the teachers do not like her getting in the way of their own plans at the school; and then there are the students who just do not see the point to trying to stave off the inevitable and who, frankly, just don't trust her.
Then she meets seven very different but very similar boys….
