Book Review: The Wave

As a reader, I am very interested in the writer Todd Strasser which was born in 1950 in New York City. Todd Strasser writes his books largely out of his own experience or remembered feeling. He writes more than 140 young-adult and middle-grade novels and many short stories under the pen names Morton Rhue and T.S. Rue. The wave is one of the many novels written by Todd Strasser. 

The novel talks about a story which based on an incident that took place in a high school history class. Ben Ross the history teacher and the main character is about to teach his students a life lesson they will never forget.

The novel starts when Mr. Ben shows a documentary about the second world war and how the Nazis Germany was. The students get upset and have a lot of questions on their mind, so Mr. Ben spends all the night reading books about Nazis and prepare himself to give his students the answer that they want. Mr. Ben decides to try an experiment to get the students to understand how Nazi Germany exists and how they gain control over Germany without someone stops them. The students seem to like the experiment and want more of that so Mr. Ben determines to go along with it, then the greats a group calls The Wave complete with a logo, mottos, and rules that he makes himself. First, he teaches the students how to get more disciplined and work together in a group. Some students take the experiment as a joke but other students are completely serious about it. David Collins a football player in the school team believes that the wave could lead the Gordon High’s football team to gain so he calls all his teammates to join the wave. Also, Laurie Sunders the brightest and the smartest student in the class is quite excited about the wave but she gets disappointed because when she tells her parents about the wave her mom freaks out because she doesn’t think that is the right way to teach the students.

One-day Laurie who is also the editor in the school newspaper gets a letter from an anonymous student complaining that the wave members are bullying other students because they don’t want to join the group. Laurie is shock and she refuses to go to the football rally that turns into the wave rally so she gets more upset because the wave take over everything and gets bigger and bigger. David who is also Laurie’s boyfriend breaks up with her because of that. Laurie and her staff determine to interrupt the wave by publishing a special issue. After the special issue is published the wave members want to stop Laurie and David takes the responsibility to do that and he goes to talk to her. David gets angry because Laurie refused to stop and he throws her to the ground. Immediately, Davide realizes that the wave makes him get into a blind person who hurts others because they are different. The novel continues when David and Laurie start to be looking for a way to stop the wave before anyone gets beaten.  The novel is written in an omniscient perspective and doesn’t have flashbacks which made it too easy to follow the story. Like I said before the novel is based on a real story that takes place at Gordon High school in California, 1969 that makes the novel very interesting. The language is easy to understand, for sure there were some words that I didn’t exactly understand but I still aware about the whole concept of the book.

The book’s message is: the writer wants to send a message to the youth they should be careful because it is too easy to fall in a trap like joining a group without knowing where it could lead, they also should accept each other despite how different they are then the life would get better.  I think the wave it is a very interesting book that I would recommend to my friends, it has good massages that the youth should be aware of.