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Schoolhouse : Madhouse is the tale of Mr. Greene, a first-year teacher armed with his idealism and work ethic, who blunders into Daledell Delldale Delldale ISD where the laws of logic and reason hold no sway. It is the kind of place where an elderly teacher can lecture from the hospital bed they’ve wheeled into her classroom and have her nurses take over teaching when she finally kicks the bucket. It’s the kind of place where the new English curriculum proudly waters down the classics into 500-word "excerptettes" like R0M30-tron and JU13T-bot, a tale of forbidden robot-love that teenagers can really relate to.

Luckily Mr. Greene finds hope in Lily, his mentor teacher and a veteran of the school, who has decided to ignore the district's asinine policies and initiatives in order to do what’s right for her students. Throughout the insanity of their school year, Mr. Greene and Lily put their new friendship and their very careers on the line in a struggle against the treacherous machinations of the district and the devious mastermind behind all the madness, their own principal. Why take the risk? Because the students deserve it.

Written as the Catch-22 of public school, Schoolhouse : Madhouse is upmarket fiction, clocking in at just under 100,000 words that will appeal to fans of Jasper Fford, Douglas Adams, and Joseph Heller. And a look below the surface of easy humor reveals a cosmic order to the district, founded on the tales of The Brothers Grimm, Aesop, and Hans Christian Andersen. As a teacher of English and Creative Writing in Texas for seven years now, I found myself compelled and especially qualified to tell this story.