Guest Book Review: The Revealers

Today I introduce what I hope will be a continuing series of guest book reviews! The first entry is from my daughter Julia. The Revealers is a young adult novel by Doug Wilhelm, and it has gained a fair amount of attention in middle schools because of its theme: physical and psychological bullying among adolescent kids, especially in schools, mostly under the noses of teachers and administrators. Here’s the review…

“This book was wonderful to read. There are hundreds of stories out there about people who get back at their bullies, but this book gives a wonderfully unusual angle on it. In this particular case, the middle-school kids getting bullied take a scientific approach, studying their tormenters to find out such useful information as why bullies bully, how bullies chose their victims, and, (drum roll please) how bullies can be stopped. I love reading stories like this, probably because I never got back at my bullies. I think that is why such stories are so popular – while a person is being bullied they don’t have the confidence to get a bit of their own back. By reading (or writing) books like these, they can do so in retrospect.”

Thank you, Julia. I might add that the author has created an online resource center for people who would like to know more about the subject, or who’d like to use the book in their schools to address the issue of bullying. He’s also turned it into a play, which has been performed in a couple of middle schools in Vermont.