Middle School Wild and Crazy
Weirdly enough this book is a cross between the classic Lord of the Flies and Captain Underpants. No really! The Tribe: Homeroom Headhunters by Clay McLeod Chapman takes a group of unsupervised damaged adolescents who have been left to their own devises, drops them into the situation of being secretly living at a middle school, and melds it with the all of the little irreverences that kids think set adult teeth on edge: gym pranks, farts, paperclip piercings, swirlies, drooling torture, and making teachers’ lives hell.
\Seventh grader, Spencer Pendleton is the penultimate bad boy. He burned down his last school (although he notes that it wasn’t entirely his fault), and he has a sassy attitude that knows no bounds. When he enrolls at Greenfield Middle he is hoping for a new start, but he doesn’t make it through the first hour without running into trouble. He eventually discovers that a “tribe” of runaway kids is living in the air vents and boiler rooms at the school. The group tags Spencer as a kindred soul and recruits him to join in their mission to inflict vengeance on their former tormentors. But who are they really? And are they any better than the very thing he wishes to escape? Peashooter, the Tribe's unbalanced captain, is a serious reader: Call of the Wild, Peter Pan, "The Most Dangerous Game." But it's his willful misreading of Napoleon that tips off Spencer that this revolution might not be so pure. Their campaign culminates in the gym with the entire school poisoned via a tainted holiday lunch, devolving into a miserable free-for-all of flatulence, vomit, and diarrhea.
Aimed a middle school boys, Tribes is meant to be a comic, anti-hero approach to the twin problems of bullying and disenfranchisement. Chapman clearly knows his audience because the book drips with every unpleasant nuance of middle school culture, and brings to life some of the revenge fantasies every pre-teen has experienced. Kids will appreciate the humor and the middle school register of the characters. But the book has a dark undertone, and real cruelty surfaces more than occasionally. For example, in a recreation of Poe’s climatic scene in the “Pit and the Pendulum”, Spencer is suspended above a running table saw and gradually lowered towards it as part of fealty challenge. The other tribe members watch passively as the horror unfolds. Although Spencer’s nose ends up remaining intact, another gang member ends up losing part of his finger to the saw. No one in the tribe is horrified. The plot spins on Spencer’s inner conflict which is well-crafted. He can’t make up his mind whether to join these crazies or turn them in. He wants so much to “belong” that he vacillates wildly between the two extremes. In spite of the plethora of literary allusions, and Spencer’s internal struggle, disappointingly there is no evolution of this protagonist. In fact, all of the characters are static. The tribe members are cartoonish caricatures of bullies and misfits that seem to have been lifted right off the pages of classic literature. Oh look, there’s Holden Caufield, and there’s Peter Pan, and over here is Fagan. That’s another sad, ineffectual aspect of the book: teens aren’t going to recognize any of the literary allusions. The tribe’s war cry is “Claw and Fang!” lifted right from White Fang. In fact, the whole tribe structure is modeled after Jack London’s pack. I kept wondering if Chapman was hoping that young people would be so entranced by his allusions that they would run out and grab copies of the real things. Sorry…not goin’ happen.
THREE STARS (with the caveat that middle school boys will love it): recommended for readers in grades 5-9 who enjoy books about middle school drama, undermining of the status quo, or potty humor. Literary lessons could be tied to the plethora of literary allusions, and I think it might be interesting to have students explore the things in story that challenge credulity. Students might also consider evaluating the characterization and then reformulating one of the tribe members with a richer characterization. This book is the first of a trilogy. The second installment, The Tribe: Camp Cannibal, is already in print. Companion reads: Ungifted by Gordon Korman, Because of Mr. Terupt by Rob Buyea, The Strange Case of the Origami Yoda (and others in the series) by Tom Angleberger, Joey Pigza Swallowed the Key by Jack Gantos, and Twerp by Mark Goldblatt.