The Chocolate War

Rating:
Summary: Choclatey
Review: The Chocolate War was a very creative book. It's about a chocolate sale at Trinity School. But the school's secret society turns the sale into a complete war. It becomes all against one when Jerry Renault refuses to sell the chocolates. And it's all Archie Costello's, the leader of the Vigils (an underground school society), fault.

If you ask me, this wasn't a very realistic book. Many elements seem unbelievable. An example is the existence of the Vigils. The vigils are a group of students at the school who control the school through fear. They are unspoken of. The teachers know about them, yet they don't stop the things they do. They give kids assignments to play tricks on teachers and other things. This to me is rather unrealistic. An example is when they completely destroyed Brother Eugene's room. But no one got in trouble for this. And all of the teachers knew who was responsible. This seems completely unrealistic to me. And the teachers in this book seem to be completely with the vigil's decisions. They always manage to get by without a single scrape. This could never happen in real life.

Another unrealistic aspect of this book is the Vigils existence. The whole idea seems ultimately immature. These boys play pranks as if they were still in middle school. It's childish in so many ways. One of the most childish characters is Archie Costello. He comes up with all of the pranks for the kids in the school to play on the teachers. He's not violent, though. He tries to psyche people out rather than just beating them up. He seems completely immature in his ideas of school society and how he seems to think that he can control the school with his ridiculous antics. This just doesn't seem humanly possible to me.

Even further, the amount of chocolates that were to be sold was way above and beyond. The school needed to sell twenty thousand boxes of chocolates. That is 50 boxes of chocolates per student! That seems like a ridiculous goal for a group of students, especially considering that the sale is optional.

Yet another thing in this book that confuses me is how the entire school can get so excited over a chocolate sale. At my school, people never want to sell things. And some of our money goes to class dues, not just the school. It seems so impractical that students could get so excited over some miniscule school sale. They even go to a point where they beat up Jerry for not selling the chocolates. It's very unreal.

This book seems to show a lot about human nature to me. Like how everyone has a need to belong. Everyone in the school suddenly follows the second Archie and the Vigils begin to sell chocolates. They fear that if they don't go along with it, they will end up just like Jerry, exiled and alone. People just want to be accepted so they go to great lengths. This book is a great example of that. It also shows that very few people are the ones willing to stand up and say no. Only one person in the entire school was willing to stand up to the system. To stand up to the Vigils. This book is a great example of how human nature can work.

School life can't get out of hand quite like this. Fights and silent wars don't break out because students will not sell chocolates. It baffles me how anyone could possibly dream up the idea that people could be seriously injured because of something as silly as a school sale. I don't think anything like this could ever happen in real life. It's very possible for students to be exiled the way Jerry Renault was, though. This book is a great example of how cruel kids can be in their adolescence. But under the circumstances in this book, a chocolate sale, the entire plot of the book is very unlikely to happen. This is another element of the book that seems highly unrealistic to me.

Even with all of this, though, it wasn't a bad book. There were some elements that were very good. For example, Robert Cormier is very good with language. One example is the opening paragraph. He uses an excessive amount of hyperbole. In the beginning it confuses you and you think that someone is dying. But after a while you only realize that the main character, Jerry Renault, is just at football practice. The whole thing is very cleverly written.

Another item Robert Cormier used a lot in his language is similes. He uses them quite often in his book. In the beginning they seem very creative. But after a while I became annoyed with them. Almost too often, it seemed that was he comparing two things. For example, on page 57 they begin, "It was as if somebody had dropped a bomb." At first you think that this is really clever. But after 191 pages of the same style of similes, it gets rather boring.

Personally, I have observed that more males would like this book compared to females. There really aren't any female characters in the book so I believe that a male can relate more to this book. More females my find this book odd because they don't understand what the kids in the book are going through or what is going through their heads. Males will understand better and will probably get a better sense of what the characters are thinking, which should make reading this book much more enjoyable.

In conclusion, I wasn't really too fond of this book. It seemed very unrealistic and childish. And since I can't relate to the characters that well, I felt that some of the actions taken by the characters were odd. This book seems very strange. All in all, I believe that this book is okay.

Rating:
Summary: The Chocolate War was a really great book!
Review: "They murdered him." The Chocolate War by Robert Cormier begins with this sentence which immediately hooks the reader into the story and begs the question, "You want to know more?" From the beginning this fiction story hints at the eventual struggle of a high school freshmen named Jerry Renault against a secret school society called the Vigils and their "assignor", Archie Costello. Jerry's act of defiance is the first to ever challenge the Vigils, and they won't put up with it. Or will they?
So let me set the scene for you. It's around the 70s or 80s, and you are going to a Christian boys school called Trinity, placed somewhere around Massachusetts in New England. Ordinary enough. They have a football team. And they have a chocolate sale. You may be thinking, "so what? That's perfectly normal." But not in The Chocolate War. A character by the name of Archie Costello, the antagonist and who just happens to be the assignor of the Vigils, decides to assign Jerry Renault, the protagonist of the story, to refuse these chocolates for ten school days, and then accept them. Now, these Vigils are not very nice people, especially Archie who, though he is not their president (Who happens to be the captain of the football team whose name is Carter), is definitely considered their leader. Good thing for Jerry he kept his mouth shut and accepted this assignment without any protestation.
But now it gets really interesting. Archie, acting as the leader of the Vigils, agrees to help Brother Leon, the temporary head of the school (in the absence of the headmaster) with the chocolate sale. The catch - this year there are twice as many chocolates to sell, and at twice the price (20,000 boxes @ $2 each)! But Archie has confidence that he can pull off the sale without a hitch. Wrong! Jerry Renault, against all odds, is the only one to stand up against the Vigils and not fully complete the assignment given to him by Archie. Jerry had no problem not selling the chocolates after the first ten days, but after that he gets in over his head and decides he's not going to sell them at all, apparently. Wait until you read about the trouble Jerry gets in with the Vigils, Brother Leon, and even a few other rambunctious characters from the school, and the total hell they put him through. He even has a poster in his locker that states, "Do I dare disturb the universe?" Well, he knows that he's never really disturbed it until his encounter at Trinity. You will be rooting him on constantly while at the same time you will be saying to yourself, "Why the heck is he doing that? Just take the chocolates, Jerry! Save yourself!"
Though the main plot centers on Jerry and the Vigils, there are other characters that are interesting and colorful in The Chocolate War. One of the more major characters is Jerry's friend Goubert, more popularly known as "The Goober". Goober loves to run, which helps him in his position of receiver on the Trinity football team, for which Jerry is a quarterback, also. Unfortunately, The Goober is also given an assignment by Archie and the Vigils, but I won't spoil this one for you.
Another character who is written well in this book is Emile Janza, who picks a few fights with Jerry throughout the book. He enjoys pulling pranks and causing trouble at the school, mainly because he has learned that most kids don't want trouble - they would rather let him take what he wants rather than cause trouble. I guess he figured out that most everyone is controlled by his or her fear. He becomes more important later in the book.
Some excellent comparisons have been made in The Chocolate War. For instance, though it is not actually necessary to the plot of the story, an interesting section of the book talks all about Jerry's mother dying, how his father is so static - he goes to the same job everyday, nothing ever happens to him - and how much Jerry is determined not to be like his father. This chapter is a great picture of what teens really do think about their parents and how much they don't wish it to be like that. Teenagers could make a great connection.
So, in conclusion, this was a very good book. I would give it five stars because the characters are great and the story line is relatively easy to follow, but you still need to think a bit. Another great thing about this book is that it has a sequel, which is perfect because I thought the ending of The Chocolate War left me hanging a LOT. I'd basically recommend this book to anyone over the age of 13 because though it is a short read, there is some more mature content that children who haven't reached puberty yet may not understand. Also some of the thought concepts are more advanced (not as advanced as the Dune series, for example) than, say, the Harry Potter books or something like that. But overall I'd say that most anyone would enjoy this fiction story about a single young man against peer pressure, superior pressure - and in general everyone - in the school. If you have any further questions please e-mail them to me - [e-mail] and I hope this review has been helpful.

Rating:
Summary: A Harmless Chocolate Sale Twisted into a War
Review: The Chocolate War by Robert Cormier is a very twisted, yet out of the ordinary novel. I chose to give this book only three stars for a couple of reasons. One was because there were multiple sections that were rather perverted. When I say perverted, I mean that there was talk of masturbation, which was disgustedly referred to as "jacking off", and porn magazines. The Chocolate War would have definitely been better without them. Another reason why I did not give five stars to this story is because it was very difficult for me to get into it. The way that the chapters kept flipping back and forth between the narrators was quite confusing.
Not only is there perversion and confusion, there is also profanity all throughout the book. This bad language was very unnecessary and could have been left out. The points that were trying to be made would have been very clear with and without the words. The only good that could have come from the use of those words is that it created a sense of reality.
Despite these points, the author created very realistic characters, and the plot is basically what keeps you going through this novel.
The way Jerry Renault, the lonely main character, handled his situations in Trinity prep school was very practical. Regardless of the fact that most of the people in Trinity feared the Vigils, a secret society within the school that very few people knew about that practically ran the school, for some reason Jerry did not. Archie Costello, a hostile member of the Vigils who gives pushover students random assignments to do, gave Jerry a task regarding the chocolate sale. All Jerry wanted to do was get through his freshman year and to possibly fit in. But the sick mind games of Archie made that simple desire nearly impossible.
The chocolate sale is a fund-raiser for Trinity prep school. It has been for many, many years. Every previous year it used to be that all the students are expected to sell twenty-five boxes of chocolates, for one dollar each, to end up selling a grand total of ten thousand boxes. But this year it was different because Brother Leon was in charge of the sale. He altered the sale so that a grand total of twenty thousand boxes would have to be sold. Thus forcing every student to sell fifty boxes of chocolate for two dollars each. One of Brother Leon's major mistakes, though, was that the chocolate sale was not mandatory. Therefore, not one single person had to actually sell any chocolates. Besides the fact that Brother Leon overlooked the fact that the chocolate sale was completely optional, anger overcame all of the professors of Trinity, who are called "Brothers". Brother Leon seemed most disturbed, because of how Jerry was going against his authority and was influencing the other students to question the importance of the chocolate sale. Jerry's refusal turns into a war, with only one questions remaining: who will survive?
Just to know that Jerry's final decision against selling chocolates ended with a poster in his locker that kept him thinking sticks out in your mind for a while. The poster read: Do I dare disturb the universe?
There are characters other than Jerry, Archie, and Brother Leon that are pretty important in this paperback. Obie, "Goober", and Emile Janza are three people that do not have huge parts but are major elements all throughout the novel.
Obie is a member of the Vigils, and somewhat a friend of Archie's. He kind of feels like a stooge in the friendship, though. It is more like a boss and employee friendship than anything else. The way he described it was that Archie is the ventriloquist and he is the dummy.
"Goober" is just another guy trying to make it through the cruel school system at Trinity. He is a quarterback on the football team and is another victim to one of Archie's assignments. He receives an assignment that turns his perspective around from shrugging the tasks off to realizing that they are wrong.
Emile Janza is one sick person. He makes some horrible decisions and is just a nasty individual in the first place. Not only do Archie and his camera catch him masturbating in the school bathroom, he also picks on freshmen and makes them buy him cigarettes. As you read through the book you notice more and more of his warped personality. By the end of the book, he ends up being a character you detest most because of a situation that ends up occurring between him and Jerry.
I recommend The Chocolate War to guys over the age of thirteen. This is due to the perversion and profanity that is very unnecessary for any person under the age of thirteen. Any highly religious human being should almost certainly steer clear of this book also, above all because of the content and the vulgarity of some of the context. Females most likely would not enjoy this book because it is semi degrading to women. This is essentially because the whole novel is based in a male prep school, filled with hormone driven creatures that are also referred to as teenage boys.

Rating:
Summary: for the chocolate or the school?
Review: The Chocolate War is an excellent book that tells a story of a boy named Jerry Renault who is a freshman that is on the freshmen football team. (He's the quarterback.) There is a group in the school he goes to called The Vigils and Archie, the assignment giver of The Vigils, gives Jerry the assignment of the Chocolates. The chocolate selling in the school is a huge deal and everybody must take part and sell their 50 boxes of chocolates. Jerry's assignment was to not take the chocolates for 10 days and then finally accept them on the tenth day. When Jerry doesn't accept then when he is supposed to the whole school is in awe that he has enough courage to stand up against The Vigils. He becomes one of the most noticed guys in the whole school until The Vigils realize that Jerry Renault is a threat to them and that he must be taken down. By the end only one can survive. Is it Jerry Renault the football player who had enough courage to stand up against what is bad in the school? Or will Archie Costello, the assignment giver of the Vigils defy all and keep his place in the society of the school? Read this book to find out.
This book was excellent and I would recommend it to anyone looking for a good book. It could be finished in a few hours or a few days depending whether you read quickly. The book starts off kind of slow but then it gets very interesting with a lot of little clues that reveals what may happen in the end. My favorite character would have to be Archie Costello because he is very sneaky and will destroy anyone who gets in his way. Jerry Renault is a freshman who wants to play for the football team and also wants to be noticed by his fellow peers. He was given the assignment of the chocolates by Archie Costello and his sidekick Obie. Obie is the secretary of The Vigils and he hates Archie and he also loves Archie. He loves to see Archie gives his assignments because he loves to see the twisted mind of Archie tick. Carter is the president of The Vigils and he is there so if any of the kids getting the assignments that are not cooperating he'll make them cooperate. Carter is also on the varsity football team and he is very large and takeout any man on the field he wants to. Brother Leon is on Archie's side and he has asked Archie if he could ask The Vigils for help with the Chocolate sale. Brother Leon has it in his head that the Vigils will be able to scare the boys of Trinity into selling all 20,000 boxes of chocolate, which is twice as much as they tried to sell last year. Brother Leon also wants to look good when the boys sell all of the chocolates. Trinity is an all-boys catholic school, where this story takes place. All of the teachers are male and are part of the church which is why they are called Brother________.
Some smaller characters are The Goober. He is also a football player and he is tall and skinny and loves to run. He is also a friend of Jerry Renault. Emile Janza is a trouble maker of the School and he loves to cause trouble. In his classes he doesn't sit in the back of the classroom like most trouble makers, he sits in the front of the classroom where he can harass and annoy the teachers more easily.
This book is easy to make a project out of. I would recommend this book to boy or girls that are in their early teens. This book doesn't require much of your imagination but it does require a lot of thought. For those who choose to red this book have fun!

Rating:
Summary: Not bad
Review: The book starts out slow and gets very interesting. The book is aobut Jerry getting assignment of Saying no in the class for selling the chocaltes. He loves getting the attion so he goes pass the assignment and keeps saying no and that gets him in trouble. Reading the boook is much better than listing to this, so go now and read the book.

Rating:
Summary: A reply to criticism
Review: You can find out what this book is about by reading the other reviews. What I want to do here is reply to some of the negative criticism that you'll see below.
The big criticism is that the story is unrealistic. Detractors claim that such a "war" would never occur over the sale of candy, that the villain Archie is a ridiculous caricature, that a secret society like the Vigils couldn't exercise such absolute control, that evil of this sort couldn't possibly be carried to this degree in a high school setting. Well, for one thing, such critics don't remember or never experienced the subtle, calculated cruelty that exists among young people, or the tremendous power that individuals can sometimes attain in schools. Maybe the story isn't probable, but it certainly isn't ridiculous.

But there's a deeper answer than that, for such criticisms betray a misunderstanding as to the nature of literature. Literature does not copy reality, it seeks to tell us something about it. Cormier's book is not primarily about a series of events at a boys' high school, but about the nature of evil and of power, and their relation to each other. Realism is important insofar as a book can only tell us something important if it relates to what we already know, but a steadfast hold on probability isn't always desirable. What Robert Cormier did with Trinity HS was to create a familiar atmosphere, then use it as a frame for his deeper observations. In Trinity we see, not a copy of reality, but an ideal, a distillation of truth into a fantastic, horrifying picture of a setting where the evil that is bound up in the human soul strains at its bonds and finally breaks free. Archie is not a caricature of the school bully. He is a summing up of all that is cruel, an incarnation of the dark powers that be. We do not need background into the social and emotional causes that supposedly molded Archie. To say that we do is to imply that there is no such thing as Evil, pure and simple. Trinity, Archie, are terrifyingly close to us. One of the characters in the story reflects that it is not just what people like the Vigils do at Trinity that horrifies him, but the worse thought of what they will do to the world. This is the message of THE CHOCOLATE WAR: what is the price of facing this evil that is in the world? And can we face up to and deny the unspoken words of the dark power:

"I am Archie. I cannot lose."

Rating:
Summary: The Very Unchocolate War
Review: Upon first reading The Chocolate War I was curious to find out what this book was all about because how could you have a war over chocolate? Well after reading it I was surprised because I wasn't very happy with neither the story nor the way it turned out. The book has a very rich theme and the overall characterization of Archie Costello and Jerry Renault was fantastic but what I think the book was lacking was a more interesting story line. I wasn't expecting the "war" to be about selling chocolates for a school fundraiser. I think it is also hard for writers that aren't teenagers or young adults themselves to write about young adults because they aren't young adults. On the other hand I think Robert Cormier did a nice job at developing Jerry at school and home. He was kind of a loner and didn't have many friends and came from a single parent family. This I believe happens a lot in today's society with teens. They feel awkward and uncomfortable, not sure where they fit in.
I thought the overall diction and plot structures were rather simple and Cormier's use of vocabulary was nothing phenomenal. I was able to pick up vivid descriptions of the characters in the book because he did a very detailed job at describing the characters and how Jerry felt about each one. One character I enjoyed reading about in particular was Archie Costello because Cormier really made the reader hate him. Everyone remembers the school bully from middle school and Archie Costello sure fit that description.
The Chocolate War is a decent book pretty much only for its strong themes and character developments but I think the story is a little ridiculous and the conclusion I was not impressed with. I would recommend this book for pre-teens and not young adults.

Rating:
Summary: The best book I ever read
Review: I love this book. I've read it at least five times in the last four years. I read other books, too, so I don't always have time to read it, but it's the only book I've read more than three times. The characters all have their own special things about them that make unique compared to characters of other books. There is the great Archie Costello, assigner of the vigils who is always calm and cool, Obie, who is always plotting revenge against Archie even though they used to be good friends, Jerry Renault, the new kid who takes any punishment that anyone can dish out, Goober, who is always the helpful friend to Jerry, and many more characters, which even the little characters have a certain description about them that makes you think you know just what that person would be like. If you read this book and like it, you HAVE TO read Beyond the Chocolate War because it finishes the story in a much better way than if you only read the first book.

Rating:
Summary: A Sarcastic Review of the one of the Worst Stories Ever.
Review: The story line of The Chocolate War is simply compelling. I have always found myself fathoming in the late hours of the night whether or not fictional characters expressed and experienced turmoil over whether or not they should sell chocolates! And the language is thrilling! My all time favorite similie ever was found in The Chocolate War. The similie went along the lines of this: "The dial tone was like a fart in his ear." I felt myself grieving every time a character became distraught and vomited, which happened about every two pages, and every time they weren't throughing up they were doing some things that were not, shall we say, audience appropriate. I can imagine all the uncouth language that goes on in both Robert Cormier's mind and the book would not be fitting in a religious setting or any place where people were being polite or cordial.
To take things out of the realm of sarcasm and into the realm of sincerity, The Chocolate War is the worst book I have ever read and Robert Cormier needs the following: therapy, a hobby, a self help book, and an application to an anonymous group of people that help troubled souls out of strange and highly unusual addictions. Once he gets the afformentioned helpful items,I may consider reading another of his books. Any parent wishing to avoid giving their child "the talk" should purchase a copy of this book and put it under a bush in their yard. It isnt worthy to sit under a tree.

Rating:
Summary: what my students think...
Review: I'm a high school English teacher and have used this book with 10th graders for the last 3 years. Despite the rave reviews that this book often receives from the Young Adult Lit critics, the majority of my kids find it boring and unrealistic. We read it and Catcher in the Rye in the same trimester, and most kids enjoy CIR more. As most of the reviews here state, if the book has any appeal at all, it's to 13-15-year-old boys. I would say that most of my kids find the most interesting part of the book to be the debate over it being banned in so many schools and libraries.