Brutal »

Michael Harmon is the author of Skate (“A remarkable first novel” according to Kirkus Reviews) and The Last Exit to Normal (“An excellent read” according to a starred School Library Journal review). He lives in Washington state.

With her martyr-doctor mother gone to save lives in some South American country, Poe Holly suddenly finds herself on the suburban doorstep of the father she never knew, who also happens to be a counselor at her new high school. She misses Los Angeles. She misses the guys in her punk band. Weirdly, she even misses the shouting matches she used to have with her mom.

But Poe manages to find a few friends: Theo, the cute guy in the anarchy Tshirt, and Velveeta, her oddly likeable neighbor and a born victim who s the butt of every prank at Benders High. But when the pranks turn deadly at the hands of invincible football star Colby Morris, Poe knows she s got to fix the system and take down the hero.

With insightfulness, spot-on dialogue, and a swiftly paced plot, Michael Harmon tells the story of a displaced girl grappling with a truly dangerous bully.


From the Hardcover edition.

Children's Literature

When sixteen-year-old Poe Holly, abandoned by her narcissistic, globe-trotting mother and sent to live with her hitherto absent father, moves from Los Angeles to a picture perfect small town in California's wine country, she expects nothing but sterile conformity—and in a book that unseats no stereotypes, that is exactly what she finds. Smugly status-conscious teachers serve on the high school's "Committee of Equality and Fairness," but work systematically to promote inequality and unfairness by favoring the brutal jocks of the novel's title and the pampered darlings of wealthy and influential parents over any students who look, dress, act, or think differently. In the one more complex portrait in the novel, Poe's guidance counselor father is genuinely torn between loyalty to the school's alleged values and love for the rebellious daughter he is coming to know and understand. But his attempts to intervene in the school's culture to offer an anti-harassment seminar cannot prevent an impending murderous tragedy. Only Poe and her similarly nonconformist and disenfranchised boyfriend can do that. The heavy handed—but sadly plausible—message of the book is directed at adults rather than at young readers, though it is one with which teens will doubtless be sympathetic: brutal school bullying is the fault of adults who at best turn a blind eye toward it, and at worst actively support the structures that perpetrate it. Reviewer: Claudia Mills, Ph.D.