#TheGoodWar #NetGalley

Thanks to NetGalley for the advance reading copy.

With the help of an interested teacher, Caleb manages to get a grant to bring eSports to his school with high end gaming equipment. The school, located in an economically depressed town, faces repeated budget cuts and has recently had to eliminate football. eSports is an up and coming field, offering scholarships and sponsors, for competitive video gamers. The school hopes it will offer students a needed new opportunity to be involved in school activities and a distraction from budget impacts.

Caleb, ever on the lookout for ways to build his resume even as a seventh grader, is excited about the possibilities an eSports club could offer and is equally as interested in the attention it garners him. Eight students form the beta members of the club: Emma, a quiet and thoughtful girl easily intimidated and worried about drawing any attention to herself; Zack, somewhat of an odd duck and naturally, a loner; Nathan, a rather self aggrandizing and self serving twerp; Crosby, an insecure, over zealous sibilant; MacKenzie, the mean girl; Tyler, a hanger on with no real identity of his own; and Gavin, the alpha jock who’s actually not so scary and intimidating. Ms. B., is the intrepid sponsor of the club and has good insight about her students and good intentions. There’s also a kind librarian who plays a minor but nonetheless heroic role. 😀

The club chooses a popular game, The Good War, based on WWII, Axis and Allies, as their charter game. The game is rated M but the teacher decides to allow it for reasons I do not understand as an educator but had she not, there’d be no plot mechanism. As you might expect, the game quickly becomes about more than wins and losses with one team taking their roles too seriously. Each of the characters is realistically struggling with a variety of issues related to identity and character that make game play and school more challenging.

Things begin to escalate as conversations about the war quickly take on menacing overtones. The students know little of the historical context of the war but are drawn to learning more about as gameplay continues. What once seemed like just the innocuous backdrop of a game becomes something more concrete and divisive. Each character has to come to terms with the fallout the club members face as they grapple with very real and adult ideas that surface through their interactions, many of which will resonate with readers as they have been in the headlines frequently the past few years.

This is a novel that deals with headline news, the insidious and sometimes caustic nature of social media, self identity, video gaming, and the meaning of integrity and friendship. Even if you’re not well versed in the world of mmorpg video gaming, Strasser does a fair job of offering simple explanations but doesn’t shy away from the vernacular. Also, since it’s Todd Strasser, you can count on some typical, adolescent gross humor that’s bound to provide some levity in an otherwise thematically heavy novel. The characters are well drawn although I’d say they are acutely self aware for seventh graders based on my interactions with seventh graders! Although the topic is timely and could offer a lot by way of discussion, the climax feels, well, anticlimactic. Instead of a telescoping climax, each character quietly grapples with and resolves their own issue which leads to a rather unsplashy finale with a very peacenik talking circle as the club agrees to disband until new guidelines for its charter can be agreed upon. All very mature and civilized but a too pat of an ending for middle schoolers. Appropriate for middle school readers.

E ARC provided by Netgalley

Caleb is glad he was able to help his school get eight new computers with a grant so that an eSports club could be started, and the school would have access to come new technology, since the computers are more powerful and can run 3D modeling programs. The teacher who worked with him, Mrs. B., wants Caleb to invite Zach to join the group. Zach is a student who struggles a lot and is picked on by the obnoxious Crosby and Gavin, who no longer have a football team to subsume their energy, since it was disabanded due to budget cuts. Emma, who has a crush on Caleb, is also interested in the group, but she is not happy when Mackenzie and her minion Isabella show up at the meeting. The eSports group decides to play the game The Good War, which is really popular, and divide into two groups. Caleb, Zach, Emma, and new student Nathan play the Allied side of the game, and Gavin, Crosby, Mackenzie, Isabella and Tyler are on the Axis side. Nathan is a bit leery of hanging out with his teammates, since he is trying to align himself with the popular kids, and Caleb especially is looked down upon as "Extra Credit Caleb", and a bit of a suck up. The games get going, and the Axis players start exhibiting worrisome signs. They wear t shirts with lightning bolts (a Nazi symbol), and when those are banned, wear gray with German army medals. Crosby is leading these efforts, having had conversations online with a guy in his twenties who keeps talking about white supremacy. Wanting to impress him, Crosby starts internalizing some of these ideas. While Caleb starts to become better friends with Zach and Emma, the tensions start to escalate at school. When the computers are a target of malware when the competition starts to get heated, the eSports club is in danger of being shut down. Racial tensions outside of school pose a danger to members of the club as well. Will The Good War end up being a bad idea?
Strengths: There are a lot of good, realistic moments in this. Anyone who remembers Channel One News will know that struggling schools have long depended on grants and corporate sponsorship to provide much needed technology to students. Mrs. B. is concerned for her students, and reads them well. Encouraging Caleb to approach Zach is something I can see teachers doing. The eSports club was harder for me to get my mind around, but with the popularity of this (along with the very realistic cutting of football teams) means that we will see more and more of this sort of club. I really enjoyed the fact that Emma was into the game, and her interest in Caleb, as a friend, teammate, and crush, was spot on. Like this author's The Wave (1981), this addresses important and timely topics of race relations and troublesome ideologies.
Weaknesses: When Mrs. B. saw that Crosby's group was internalizing Nazi ideas, she should have immediately broken up and rearranged the groups. I wouldn't have allowed that particular game any longer. Of course, then there wouldn't have been much of a story!
What I really think: This had more of a YA vibe, especially regarding the pacing and character descriptions at the beginning o the book. Still, this is an interesting topic, and the video gaming is a topic for which my students are constantly asking, and which is difficult to find. I will purchase, but would have written parts of this very differently.

Caleb helped write the grant that bought eight high-powered gaming computers for his middle school, and he becomes a member of the school’s new esports team. The group decides to devote a semester to playing a popular game based on World War ll called the Good War and the group members form teams representing the Axis and the Allies.

There are a lot of friendship and personality issues to be worked out among the team members as well as game roles and strategies to decide. Soon their matches are being live streamed with classmates providing commentary on Twitch, and the local news is paying attention. When members of the Axis team begin speaking with German accents and wearing matching t-shirts decorated with German medals, it’s clear that hate groups have begun to influence the gamers and both kids and adults have to figure out how to respond.

The first of many books I anticipate reading about e-sports and the sub-plot about hate groups is age-appropriate and necessary.