Crazy House

Crazy House is a 2017 young adult dystopian novel from James Patterson, co written with Gabrielle Charbonnet. The novel is set in the United Cities of America, a future authoritarian regime that has gradually replaced the United States, and centers on twin sisters Cassie and Becca Greenfield. The girls live in a small farming town in what was once the Midwest, and the novel opens with Becca disappearing in the middle of the night under circumstances that the local authorities are unwilling to investigate. Cassie, who has always been the responsible twin, sets out to find Becca and ends up uncovering a much larger system of state run institutions called crazy houses where the regime sends teenagers it considers troublesome.

The crazy houses of the title are not psychiatric institutions in any conventional sense. They are reform schools, prison camps, and execution facilities all rolled into one, designed to break dissident youth and to provide a steady supply of bodies for whatever uses the regime has decided are necessary. As Cassie penetrates the system to find Becca, she discovers that her supposedly model citizen sister has been involved in a resistance movement that Cassie knew nothing about. The two girls have to figure out whether they can trust each other, whether they can survive the institution, and whether they can take any meaningful action against the regime that has been quietly destroying lives all around them.

The Patterson and Charbonnet collaboration produces a brisk, plot driven novel that moves at the pace Patterson’s brand requires. The chapters are short, the dystopian world building is sketched in rather than fully developed, and the central twin relationship gives the book its emotional anchor. The political material owes obvious debts to The Hunger Games and to the wider YA dystopian boom of the early 2010s, with the additional Patterson touches that distinguish his work from the more literary entries in the subgenre.

For readers who enjoyed the Maximum Ride series or other Patterson YA work, Crazy House delivers what the brand promises. For new readers, it is an accessible entry into Patterson’s young adult catalogue. The book is the first in a duology that continues with The Fall of Crazy House.