There's a simplified quality to the book's insights into the Darwinian setting of high school that feels closer to, say, The Breakfast Club than A Separate Peace. Bromine and the scheming parish priest, Father Mercedes. It's a festival of bad karma, variously opposed and abetted by the overwhelmed principal, Sister Maria the tormented, tormenting guidance counselor, Ms. The book follows three freshmen: Peter Davidek, who's regularly trying and often failing to do the right thing his friend Noah Stein, with similarly good intentions when he isn't spoiling for a fight and Lorelei Pascal, a girl so intent on staying popular that she sacrifices her friends and her principles along the way.Īll three are caught up in a noxious, semi-official system in which each incoming class is subject to a year-long round of increasingly nasty hazing - all in good fun, allegedly - by upperclassmen eager to pay forward the pain they once suffered.

If Breznican can't be said to have added anything new or original to our understanding of the psychology and group dynamics that lead to these tragedies, it's also true that he takes the phenomenon seriously, even as he weaves threads of comedy into this dark tapestry of woe. It's a familiar topic and, in this era of heightened consciousness about bullying and its occasionally horrific consequences on high school and college campuses, distressingly timely. Opening with a bravura set piece involving the desperate (and uncomfortably hilarious) revenge of a viciously bullied student, Brutal Youth proceeds with near-clinical precision to lay out just how brutal, and brutally disillusioning, the world of secondary education can be. Mike's, in the Pittsburgh area in the early 1990s.īrutal Youth is about no more and no less than the remarkable ability of high school to bring out the absolute worst in young people and the adults who are there, ostensibly, to teach, guide and protect them.

There's no such pussyfooting about in the case of Anthony Breznican's crudely fashioned yet bluntly effective debut novel, Brutal Youth, set in a morally and physically decaying Catholic high school, known as St. The Catcher in the Rye? That's about a drunk baseball player, right? Lord of the Flies? Sounds like science fiction.

The titles of many novels are famously unhelpful as we're scanning the bookstore shelves for something to read.

Brutal youth by anthony breznican