Rogue Wave

I had never heard of Todd Strasser's book The Wave until a bunch of high school students came in looking for copies for a school reading assignment. I happened upon a copy not long ago at a used book store and brought it home. I just finished reading it, and rather than making me feel badly about human nature and the Holocaust, it mainly annoyed me with its wooden plot and awkward writing. There are a zillion books that portray more forcefully the notion of power in the hands of a few, and a zillion more that have greater impact about the horrors of the Holocaust. I did some web surfing for information on the original Wave classroom experiment that Strasser's book is to have been based on and was struck by the irony of the existence of websites denying that The Wave ever existed, just as there are sites denying the same about the Holocaust itself. I'd like to know what students required to read this have to say afterward. As for me, I'd rather have spent the hour rereading Yolen's The Devil's Arithmetic or Warren's Surviving Hitler.