It was also loosely adapted as the 1994 Lifetime television film Untamed Love, starring Ashlee Lauren, Lois Foraker and Cathy Lee Crosby.

[3] The book opens with Hayden, a special education teacher, reading a newspaper article about a six-year-old girl who had beat up and burned a three-year-old boy a couple of days prior.

At the beginning of the year, Torey is given a long, narrow, carpeted classroom with a single window at the end – very inconvenient for a special education class.

Her teaching assistant is a Mexican migrant worker named Anton who did not finish high school.

On her first day of school, at lunch, Sheila takes all of the goldfish from the aquarium and stabs their eyes out with a pencil.

Torey also shampoos Sheila's hair and styles it with kiddie barrettes, giving the child a chance to enjoy feeling beautiful and learn how delightful it is to feel appreciated and cared for, although Sheila fears that the pretty new hair decorations will be confiscated by her father.

However, when given other media to work with (stacking blocks, for instance), she reveals that she is incredibly smart and talented for someone who only had a few months of first grade; her I.Q.

The students were given plenty of notice, but Sheila interpreted it as abandonment by the one person who had shown her love and misbehaved throughout the whole trip.

Sheila eventually discloses that her uncle Jerry had tried to rape her, and when she was too small, he cut her genitalia with his knife.

The book has been used as the basis of research by Appalachian State University, by Michael Marlow & Gayle Disney.