Ten years ago, the cozy world of elite New England prep schools was rocked by a string of sexual assault scandals involving many of the most prestigious ones. Cameron Kelly Rosenblum seems to have used one such scandal, at St. Paul’s School, where a star athlete was charged with raping a naïve freshman, as the model for her searing young adult novel “The Sharp Edge of Silence.”

Rosenblum’s story is narrated through the eyes of three students at Lycroft Phelps School (the very name oozes upper class privilege), set like St. Paul’s in the “bucolic” countryside of New Hampshire. There’s Charlotte, an insecure ballet dancer with a crush on a star athlete; Max, a geeky scholarship kid; and Quinn, a damaged and rage-fueled sophomore girl.

But it is really Quinn’s story, as becomes clear when we meet her during the first week of school. Q (as she’s known) is bent on one thing: getting her hands on a gun. “Because Colin Pearce must die.”

Having pulled the pin and lobbed that grenade into the placid pond of the story, Rosenblum, who lives in Greater Portland, has our full attention. We soon learn that at the end of her freshman year, Q had been raped by Colin Pearce. Q was a naïve and impressionable 15-year-old. Colin was the star athlete on the elite varsity rowing team and thus the most powerful of the “Lycroft Rowing Gods.”

But she told no one, until finally confessing to her family that summer. Q is a sixth -generation “legacy” from a wealthy family. Even so, she is helpless. The family lawyer advises against pressing charges: “It’s the oldest story in a long, sad book,” Q overhears him say. “The classic he said, she said.” It’s a mystery, he adds, why women don’t just “go rogue.”

So she opts to “go rogue.” Getting revenge is the one reason Q has returned to Lycroft. She’s being swallowed by despair and self-loathing. Anger is the only thing that keeps the black cloud at bay: “Staying angry keeps me breathing.”

Rosenblum depicts in detail the psychic damage a sexual assault inflicts. Q’s life, her sense of self, were irrevocably changed: “He stole my normal,” she says. It infuriates her that he goes on as usual. ”He doesn’t deserve normal!” she rages. Equally painful is Q’s inability (like many assault victims) to talk to even her closest friends and family about what happened, and about how she is (not) coping. Her silence is a double-edged sword. It’s the enemy of her getting justice (“She made all the mistakes that a #MeToo-aware girl should know not to make”). And her silence now is her own biggest obstacle to healing.

The dancer Charlotte’s story is less intriguing. Her helpless infatuation with Seb, another Rowing God, leads her into stupid (and hackneyed) jealousies – of other girls, of his dedication to rowing. You’d want to shake her, if Rosenblum hadn’t made Seb into such a likable guy. I mean, he not only rows like a god, but can quote Robert Frost. (Rosenblum has a gift for portraying the macho, entitled jocks as nuanced, often likable people.)

The story of Max is almost as compelling as Q’s because he is put into the worst kind of moral bind. A self-described scrawny nerd, he is painfully aware of his lowly “place” on campus. But he has a kind of “dickish edge” that doesn’t suffer bullying, as well as a keen (and funny) bullshit detector. The oily headmaster, for example, he nails for having a “fundraiser’s smile” while wearing a ball cap with his blazer to look “approachable.”

When the rowing team comes to Max on bended knee – they’ve lost their coxswain a week before the “big race,” with all their Ivy League scholarships at stake – and ask him to become “the brains of the boat,” he responds by quickly mastering the art of coxing.

Rosenblum brings this ultimate team sport to life and excels at depicting the genuine affection it creates among the crew, a “band of brothers” camaraderie that’s very seductive to a perennial outsider like Max. After an exhilarating row, Max basks in Colin’s praise. “I can forget being 5-foot 5 and my concave chest,” he says. “This is it. A high like I’ve never known.”

But then he’s inducted into a secret society, a kind of a junior Skull and Bones celebration of toxic masculinity. He is appalled to discover part of its code is to “hunt down girls and bang them,” stealing their panties for trophies – which Colin did after assaulting Q.

This knowledge gives Max the power to throw his own grenade into the world of privilege and entitlement that is Lycroft Phelps, but it means having to choose between betraying his new brothers and helping his friend Q get justice.

Rosenblum has told this painfully honest story with eloquence, a keen understanding of boarding school culture, and a pitch perfect ear for the way teens talk and behave. Her insight into the agonies of sexual assault survivors comes from her own experience of it. She says she wanted to write about a girl “bold enough to fight for herself with everything she’s got.” She’s done that with Quinn, a courageous girl who finally finds her voice, and a way to shatter the silence.

Amy MacDonald is a children’s author and freelance writer. She lives in Portland.