The Wave

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Type of book, Time and Setting:
This book is a true story, which took place in Palo Alto, California in 1969. But the names and places have been changed in this book. The thing who is scaring me is that this story could happen anywhere in the world, any time.
It’s quite hard to put this book in a special genre, because this has happened at real. I would probably categorize it as a reality story.

Main Characters:
The main characters we’re following are Laurie Sounders, David and Ben Ross. Laurie is this young ambitious student in Gordon High. She works with the school paper “The Gordon Grapevine”. Laurie’s boyfriend David Collins is playing football in Gordon Highs football team. The class looser is Robert Billings and doesn’t really care about school and has quite bad self-esteem. Ben Ross is their teacher in history class. Both, Laurie and David think that Mr. Ross is a very good teacher. Laurie is what you may call “The hero” in this book

Language:
There was slang in the book and it wasn’t hard to understand. Sure there were a few words that I didn’t know the exact meaning of but I still understood the concept after reading the whole sentence and some times I also looked in the English-Swedish dictionary. The narrator of the book is a person who isn’t in the book, it’s told in third person. The book is chronological and does not have any flashbacks.

Message:
The writer, Morton Rhue, want to tell us about that we should have questions about everything, that we shouldn’t just join anything without knowing what the consequence’s going to be. Also he’s saying that it’s so easy to fall in the trap without you to noticing it, so you better watch out.

Story:
The class watches a film about World War II, Hitler and the death camps. After the film some of the pupils have some questions that Ben finds impossible to answer, how the Nazis could do the things they did, how the rest of Germany could be so passive, why anybody could join the Nazis. Ben comes up with an idea that he thinks is very good. One little experiment who could show the class how the Germans easily joined the Nazis. He uses the students as guinea pigs. He started next lesson with the experiment, first he taught them to be disciplined and then he taught them about community and action. Then he taught them a salute that they always should make when they met him or a member of the class. He painted a symbol of a wave and called the whole thing “The Wave”. Now on the always should follow he’s rules:

- Always begin the question with, "Mr. Ross".
- Stand at the side of your desk while talking.
- Always bring pencil and notepaper to class.
After practicing a couple of minutes with the rules, Lauren could feel the energy and force like the class was one unit. But there was something else too, and she wasn’t sure that she liked that feeling.

The whole class stood up, did the salute and nearly screamed the motto “Strength through discipline, Strength through community, strength through action”. Ben thought that it was amazing to see, he had thought that the pupils wouldn’t like to be disciplined and that he made decisions for them, but they worked much harder and liked it a lot. Even students from other classes went to his class just to be in “The Wave”. Ben did member cards gave it to the students, some had a X on it and they which got one of these was supposed to report if anyone of the members did something wrong. The experiment was a big success Ben thought.

The Wave got more and more scary. People had been threatened and beaten up for not joining “The wave”. To the school magazine The Gordon Grapevine and anonymous letters had been sent about students picking on other students. There was fear underneath it all. To make people see the "dark side" of The Wave Laura and a few non-wave members published articles that revealed the threats etc. David got the mission to stop her from her "friends" Brad and Eric. But how should he stop her? And would Laura’s misgivings be confirmed? How could she stop the wave before someone else was beaten up or threatened? And before it got too far…

Opinions:
I think that this book was very good. It was written well and the language wasn’t too hard so that you had to interrupt hole time in the middle of the reading. It was an interesting topic and the fact that it has happen for real made it even more interesting. While I was reading it I got surprised in how good it was and how much I really liked it. It made me think about how easy it is that what happened in Germany can happen...