Review: The Good War
The Good War by Todd Strasser Delacorte Press (imprint of Penguin Random House) Category: Middle Grade Reviewer: Stacy Nockowitz Buy at Bookshop.org In 1981, Todd Strasser wrote The Wave , based on the true story of high school history teacher Ben Ross and the class experiment he carried out in 1969. By creating a stringent behavioral “system” in his classroom, Ross showed his students how easily people could be swept up in a movement like Nazism. Now, forty years later, Strasser has written an updated, middle school version of The Wave titled The Good War. Instead of a high school history class, The Good War takes place in the newly formed eSports club of a middle school. The students in the club represent a wide swath of middle school types: the goody-goody, the high achiever, the hulking athlete, the “weird” loner, the bully, the mean girls, and so on. The kids come together after school to play a video game called The Good War , a World War II simulation game that pits the Alli