Of all the annoying things that could possibly happen in a group project in high school, getting possessed by a ghost usually isn’t one of them. In her latest YA thriller, The Silenced, Diana Rodriguez Wallach explores the dark realities of the multi-billion-dollar Troubled Teen Industry—private institutions designed to be the solution for teenagers struggling with behavioral issues, including addiction, mental illness, and learning disabilities—through the hauntings of an abandoned girls’ reform school. Often veiled under the guise of religious or therapeutic boarding schools with promises to help struggling parents, these correctional facilities were unregulated centers for abuse, forced labor, and many other forms of maltreatment. What begins as a ghost story slowly reveals itself to be something more unsettling, as its characters are forced to reckon with long-buried sins that still shape the present.
The novel follows Hazel Perez, a straight-A junior in high school who can only be described as unnoticed by her peers. She is assigned to a group project on a local landmark alongside estranged friends with pasts deemed to be better left ignored. Dedicated to going to college with the belief that life will get better after high school, Hazel just wants to get the project over with as painlessly as possible. For what they think will be just another assignment, the group chooses to go on a late-night research trip to Oakwell Farms School for Girls, an abandoned reform school in suburban Philadelphia colloquially known as “The Farm.” But Hazel’s trip to The Farm ends much differently than she could’ve ever expected. After what is believed to be a dangerous fall when exploring The Farm, Hazel reawakens with mysterious desires for revenge that are not her own. The lives of everyone in this group project are drastically altered as they are forced to work together to uncover what happened to Hazel that night.
The Silenced is an exploration of who gets erased from history and who does the erasing. The Farm was an educational program in the 1990s that was marketed to parents as a wholesome learning experience for girls to develop a sense of respect and responsibility. Behind the scenes, it was a place that took girls deemed defiant and unacceptable by society to be abused into obedience and silence, made to disappear quietly for the peace of mind of parents and society. Drawing from the extensive documented horrors of real programs and institutions in the Troubled Teen Industry going back as far as the 1960s, Wallach builds The Farm’s horror story based on the real institutions still in existence today, which lends to the pervasive eerie feeling throughout the book. By grounding a ghost possession story in historical facts and setting, she transforms the typical haunted-location plot with characters who bring attention to the realities of the people they represent.
Wallach weaves The Farm’s institutional cruelty with religious beliefs rooted in fear and intergenerational trauma. Hazel’s own apprehensions are compounded by pressure from her religious and emotionally distant parents, who push her not to research The Farm for her project. As any teenager would do, Hazel takes her parents’ avoidance as a sign that the abandoned building might have more secrets hidden than what history books say. What she finds are secrets buried by her family, but others involved have never forgotten about them.
This surpassed Catholic stoicism or gracefully enduring hardship. This was a lie of omission that bordered on betrayal—our family apparently excelled at that, locking so much in our chests. Even saying ‘I love you’ was hard. It wasn’t that we didn’t feel it; we just weren’t a family who said. But a secret like this…was something I thought was reserved for “other people” on talk shows with swinging folding chairs. We weren’t supposed to be those people. But now we were.
Hazel begins the novel wanting nothing more than to disappear from her high school life, be a good daughter, and maintain her top-of-class status. But after uncovering who the girls at The Farm really were, the abuse inflicted on them by the men who run the program, and how their hope slipped away, Hazel learns that invisibility isn’t safety. It makes girls easy to lose and forget. This realization forces her to challenge the secrets of her family, repair broken relationships, and accept her own identity. The novel’s strength lies in its central theme of identity. Their identity was why the girls were trapped at The Farm in the first place. This is a story about what happens when injustice is ignored long enough to fester across generations.
In a captivating revenge plot, Wallach weaves the issues of the past and present through a story of ghosts and hauntings that echo the real horrific events and the lasting traces of cruelty. The Silenced doesn’t just ask the reader to be afraid of ghosts. It forces them to remember who creates ghosts.
You can purchase a copy of The Silenced here.
The Silenced
Diana Rodriguez Wallach
Delacorte Press
September 16, 2025
384 pages
Katharine is a third-year student at the Drexel University pursuing a B.S. double-majoring in Marketing and Business Analytics. She loves reading fantasy books and dreams of working within literary publishing after graduation. Aside from curling up under a pile of blankets, you can find her journaling, rewatching her favorite TV shows, and attempting to propagate her houseplants.