The chocolate war [sound recording] / Robert Cormier; Read by Frank Muller.—
5 sound discs (ca. 5 hr., 38 min.) : digital ; 4 3/4 in.
ISBN: 9780739350157
Read by Frank Muller, with an introduction read by the author.
1. High schools – Fiction. 2. Educational fund raising – Fiction. 3. Bullying – Fiction.
Consider this the worst-case scenario of a school fundraiser. Combine a villainous frightened acting head of school who’s gambled school funds in a desperate scheme to sell twice the usual quota of chocolates, a shadowy underground gang led by a sadistic prankster, a stubborn, isolated, grief-stricken new student who refuses to participate, several other cruelly dishonest students, put them all in a cash-strapped boy’s private high school and you have a setting on the extreme end of the bell-curve of social pathology. There’s also lots of blood, sweat, tears, and vomit in this most macho setting. It climaxes in a boxing match staged before the whole student body. With all these extremes, it’s no wonder that teens, fighting desperate, if developmentally appropriate, psychological battles between the extremes of childhood and the unknown territory of their approaching adulthood, love this book. It’s kept this title on school assignment lists, in school and public libraries, and on most challenged lists by parents for decades, long after its 1974 debut, when “doing your own thing” vs. conforming to the system was uppermost in teen minds. Cormier’s sometimes overwritten and somewhat overwrought narrative of high school bullying is read with appropriate Sturm und Drang by Frank Muller
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