Review: The Reckless Club

The Reckless Club by Beth Vrabel
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

If you loved The Breakfast Club, you will love this book. If you are too young to know what The Breakfast Club is, ask your parents. Five extremely different students find themselves spending the last day of summer vacation volunteering at a local assisted living facility as punishment for things they did on the last day of school. At first, each student seems like a cliche; there's the drama queen, a flirt, an athlete, a rebel, and a nobody. As the story unfolds, we learn there is much more depth to each character. They are all suffering in their own ways. From the outside, each character may seem to have their stuff together or like they don't care about anyone else's opinion, but they are all just trying to hide their insecurities. These kids have parents who have walked out on them or who are verbally abusive. They feel pressure to be perfect, liked by everyone else, and to be someone other than who they actually are.

After first meeting the characters, readers may be annoyed with their behavior or lack of empathy, but they will quickly fall in love with each character when they learn more about "the Reckless Club's" backstories. This book will provide readers with a chance to think more deeply about bullying and how one's actions affect others. It would work well in an empathy unit or text set. Vrabel's novel could be a perfect mentor text to use in a writer's workshop on character development as she does an excellent job at slowly unraveling their personalities. This book is a must-read for students in 5th grade - 8th grade.

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