The Reckless Club

August 1, 2018
Vrabel's latest middle-grade novel explicitly remixes John Hughes' iconic 1985 movie, The Breakfast Club, for the Instagram generation.Five eighth-graders report for all-day detention for pranks they committed on the last day of middle school. Each comes from a different clique: Jason, an artistic white "Nobody"; Lilith, a talented Indian-American "Drama Queen"; Rex, an emo white "Rebel"; Wes, a charismatic African-American "Flirt"; and Ally, a high-achieving white "Athlete." They gather at an assisted-living home, where their strict principal introduces them to his sister, who runs the facility. The students are then each paired with a resident at the home, and they are also assigned an essay, to be completed by the end of the day. As in the film, these five teenagers who believe they have nothing in common bond over the course of the day as they open up and reveal their struggles: divorce, poverty, racism, bullying. And, similar to the film, the novel ends with a jointly written essay ("But after today, we just see each other. And we're going to change things, make them better, starting now") signed "The Reckless Club." The third-person narration mostly alternates among Jason, Lilith, and Wes, with Ally's and Rex's perspectives much later. The novel is tender, and it goes where Hughes' film never could have with its multicultural cast, but it's slow to start and cannot escape a preachy feel as the kids open up.Mostly accomplishes its feel-good goals. (Fiction. 10-14)

COPYRIGHT(2018) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

September 1, 2018

Gr 5-7-In this middle school take on The Breakfast Club, five barely acquainted students are serving detention, each for a last-day-of-school transgression none of the others nor readers know about, by helping out at a nursing home on the last day of summer vacation before they enter high school. Each is assigned to an elderly resident and, in alternating chapters, their personalities and issues are revealed along with those of their assignees, even as they create mayhem, Keystone-cops fashion, by targeting and pursuing a nurse they suspect of stealing. Further, they are charged with creating and presenting a skit and writing an essay on what they learned, a tall order for one day. Chapter headings and physical descriptions set the characters up as types: Jason, "The Nobody"; Rex, "The Rebel"; Lilith, "The Drama Queen"; Wes, "The Flirt" and Ally, "The Athlete." Much of the narrative reads like stage direction, but personalities and setting are sufficiently authentic. Readers will recognize and identify with some of the students' situations and will be interested to learn just what wrongdoing each is guilty of and what their principal had in mind by bringing them together for such an unusual "punishment." VERDICT A five-problem novel that entertains and provides some life lessons.-Marie Orlando, formerly at Suffolk Cooperative Library System, Bellport, NY

Copyright 2018 School Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

January 1, 2019
Five middle schoolers are assigned to work in an assisted-living home as punishment for misdeeds. Over the course of one day, they learn to look deeper than the limiting social identities they've each established, bond with the elderly residents, and solve a mystery or two. An ambitious plot is neatly wrapped up in the end.

(Copyright 2019 by The Horn Book, Incorporated, Boston. All rights reserved.)