At first reminiscent of The Chocolate War, Robert Cormier's YA classic about bullying in a Catholic high school, Anthony Breznican's Brutal Youth soon establishes itself as a more broadly focused--and darkly funny--fiction debut.
It's 1991, and St. Michael the Archangel High School is in decline: the building is crumbling, enrollment is dwindling and, after a frequently bullied student snaps and terrorizes the campus one spring morning, the parish pastor has stepped up his not-so-secret campaign to have the school shut down. Father Mercedes intends to make St. Michael's principal, Sister Maria, pay for allowing the culture of student-on-student harassment that may have fostered the outburst; for her part, the principal believes that the school's hazing tradition fosters class morale. But the cliquishness and jockeying for status are hardly confined to the students at St. Michael's, where some staff members are returned graduates still living out their adolescent dramas.
Peter, Noah and Lorelei meet on the first day of their freshman year. While they soon unite to support one another against bullies of all stripes, they won't be able to hold together for long. Over the course of the year, each will be ostracized; by spring, one will rise as a school hero, one will find sympathetic acceptance for all the wrong reasons, and one will end up in a place far worse than St. Michael's.
Breznican leavens the bleak premise with sharp, darkly comic dialogue that feels authentic to his well-drawn characters, particularly the adolescents. This quick, unsettling coming-of-age novel blends sympathy and satire with surprising effectiveness. --Florinda Pendley Vasquez, blogger at The 3 R's Blog: Reading, 'Riting, and Randomness