The Academy at Swift River specializes in one of the toughest tasks a school can undertake: helping teenagers in crisis regain their bearings. During a fourteen-month academic term at the school, the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist David L. Marcus witnesses the intense process that turns these kids around.

In his time on campus, Marcus gets to know a diverse and remarkable group of teenagers: a former straight-A student reeling from the death of her mother, a teachers' son grappling with anger over being adopted, a southern girl immersed in drug abuse and unsafe sex, and a boy from Queens overwhelmed by depression. Granted full access to the Swift River proceednigs, Marcus is given the rare chance to observe the students' struggles and see their transformations from the inside. In What It Takes to Pull Me Through, he charts a path to redemption that any teen, any parent, can follow.