The Good War

December 7, 2020
Through a grant, “Extra Credit” Caleb Arnett has secured top-of-the-line gaming computers for Ironville Middle School, a largely white institution whose football team was cut due to funding, and he’s now one of the inaugural members of the school’s eSports club. With teacher approval, the kids, including team captains Emma Lopez and Gavin Morgenstern, select The Good War—a WWII game in which players take the sides of Axis or Allies. The students react in various ways to their new knowledge of Nazism: after a few weeks, Gavin’s team asks to be Axis for every round, and they begin trying out German accents and clothes, seemingly unaware of these actions’ implications. Online, an older white supremacist begins grooming one of the players, employing hateful rhetoric that coincides with outside intrusions of Nazi slogans and images into the club’s chat box and matches. Strasser (The Summer of ’69) packs a lot into this brief tale—while his damning of hate groups is anything but subtle, by using a gaming lens to explore the students’ entrée to prejudice and radicalization, he succeeds in lending immediacy and accessibility to his cautionary tale. Ages 10–up. Agent: Stephen Barbara, InkWell Management.

In this gaming-themed novel, Robbie Daymond deftly narrates the authentic-sounding middle-school dialogue. Teams in Caleb's school's new e-sports club compete in a WWII RPG called The Good War. Unversed in WWII history, students develop their own assumptions about the war. When the Axis team starts identifying with their gaming characters, German Wehrmacht soldiers, light middle-school banter takes a more serious tone. Daymond is particularly chilling as Caleb's father explains Nazism to him. Online radicalization, misinformation, and bullying surface subtly in the actions and words of the main characters--"Extra-credit Caleb," shy Emma, bully Crosby, mean girl Mackenzie, scheming Nathan, and quiet Gavin. Listeners hear angry, chanting adults, and the mood is frightening when Crosby accidentally lands in the middle of a protest confrontation. Timely and urgent. L.T. Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award � AudioFile 2021, Portland, Maine