League of Strays
Gr 8 Up-A group of students brought together in secret by charming yet slightly menacing Kade becomes a weapon of revenge. Charlotte, the new girl flying under the radar, receives a cryptic invitation and finds herself meeting with some stock high-school types: the brainy girl, the outed and bullied boy, the camo-jacketed angry child of an alcoholic mother, and of course, Kade himself: persuasive, mysterious, and compelling. All the misfits Kade has chosen have experienced some bullying or mistreatment. One by one, he engineers comeuppance; for example, the genius whose grade-point average took a plunge because of a gym teacher breaks in to the teacher's office at night with the League of Strays to trash it and a storage room and to scrawl epithets, bringing the principal, Kade's nemesis, to full alert. Romance between Charlotte and Kade produces some steam, and questions about his problems with the law and a girl from his past infuse some mystery. However, savvy readers will have little doubt that he is a bad apple and that things with the League of Strays are destined to become ugly, even deadly. Clunky similes don't enhance the writing. Plot, characters, and even the title fall short of what most readers demand in realistic YA fiction: realism. What teachers use paper grade books, and what school isn't secured with video surveillance these days? This one comes across as out of date and out of touch, rather than drawn from contemporary life.-Suzanne Gordon, Lanier High School, Sugar Hill, GAα(c) Copyright 2011.  Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc.  No redistribution permitted.