Boot Camp
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4.0 • 1 Rating
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- $10.99
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- $10.99
Publisher Description
In the middle of the night Garrett is taken from his home to Harmony Lake, a boot camp for troubled teens. Maybe some kids deserve to be sent there, but Garrett knows he doesn't. Subjected to brutal physical and psychological abuse, he tries to fight back, but the battle is futile. He won't be allowed to leave until he's admitted his "mistakes" and conformed to Harmony Lake's standards of behavior. And there's no way to fake it. Beaten, humiliated, and stripped of his pride, Garrett's spirit is slowly ebbing away. Then he hears whispers of an escape plot. It's incredibly risky -- if he's caught, the consequences will be unthinkable -- but it may be his only way out.
In this tense, riveting novel, award-winning YA author Todd Strasser reveals what really goes on in highly secretive -- and notoriously dangerous -- boot camps, a stealth prison system where any teenager under the age of eighteen can be imprisoned at his parents' whim.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In his latest novel, Strasser (Can't Get There from Here) delivers an indictment of boot camps used to control unruly teenagers. Following a middle-of-night abduction, 15-year-old Garrett Durrell finds himself being driven to an unknown location in upstate New York. Upon his arrival at Lake Harmony, he is told that his parents have paid for his stay at the facility, "a highly structured boarding school specializing in intensive behavior modification," until he learns to act like a respectful son. While most camp attendees are there because of problems with drugs or violent behavior, Garrett's high-powered parents have enrolled him largely because he refuses to stop dating Sabrina his former math teacher, eight years his senior. The staff is authorized to use any force necessary to alter the students' negative behaviors; this can include Temporary Isolation (24 hours of lying face down on the floor of a concrete cell), being shackled outdoors overnight, and a blaring drone of propaganda during meals. Additionally, students report on each others' infractions and abuse those who are making little progress. Unwilling to renounce his love for Sabrina, Garrett befriends two students who have devised an escape plan, and the trio flees north to Canada. Strasser paints his protagonist as heroic, sympathetic and rational ("The product Lake Harmony delivers is the child you always knew you had... not the one you got stuck with"), and when he is ultimately broken bodily and spiritually the tragedy is all the more profound. Strasser offers no easy answers, and nimbly navigates a host of moral gray areas. Ages 12-up.
Customer Reviews
Well... I'm not sure how to feel.
So the main character is sent away to a bootcamp for having a relationship with a teacher, smoking drugs ( sometimes), skipping school and staying out all night.
The main character thinks he done nothing wrong and has been sent there because he doesn't fit his parents view of what they want him to be.
The bootcamp is a horrible place, they beat the teens that are there and have other teens beat the other teens so the ' teachers' look bad, amoug other horrible things that they do.
Okay- let me start with the main character, through the whole book he goes through so much because he believe he doesn't belong there. They treat him horribly as punishment- and what they do to him is wrong on so many levels, but still he actually did do wrong, he spelt with his teacher, he did drugs he skipped school, and he still hate his parents for sending him away, I feel that if he had accepted that he had done wrong but still frought for his right to not be mid treated and beaten, I would have liked him more, I seen him as ignorant, no way did he deserve what he got but he also wasn't innocent.
Anyway, he fight the whole book that he won't be made into the person they want him to be, but slowly you can tell he's breaking.
Him and 2 others break out of the place, they make it all the way for freedom for him to turn around and save the people chasing him and ended back up in the bootcamp allowing his friend to live.
Bravo for him not to just escape but to allow his friend to escape.
But I was still mad that he got sent back to bootcamp!
In the end he fully break and become the kid his parents wanted. This makes me more mad, i had liked that he didn't want to fit a form even if I didn't like that he could accept he made mistakes in the past and then In the end he ends up breaking!
It's hard to read him like this, your waiting for him to say something smart or to let you in that he hasn't really changed and he is just pretending.
It isn't till the last page were I finally accepted that he had fully changed.
At that time his stupid mother come in and saves him asking if he was beaten' little to late women, he was beaten to an inch of his life amonth ago, where was you then.
All in all the writer is very good, he did his research.
When reading this I didn't realise that boot camps was a real thing. You don't hear about it where I live.
It was a huge shock to realise that this was a thing and parents would send there childern there when they couldn't do they're jobs as parents.
The writer opened my eyes to this.
A good read, recommended for people that don't want a soppy love story, and a not so happy ending.
Not for the weak of heart.