In the winter 1980 issue of Top of the News Norma Bagnall describes The Chocolate War as a hopeless novel about the forced sale of candy in a boys' parochial high school [see excerpt above]. She considers it an unrealistic picture of adolescent life and unsuitable reading material for teenagers. We think her description is inaccurate and her criticism unwarranted.

Cormier's novel is only superficially about the fund-raising activities at a Catholic institution; its greater concerns are with the nature and functioning of tyranny. While it demonstrates the inability of a decent individual to survive unaided in a corrupt and oppressive society, it does not imply that such defeat is inevitable. To see the book as something "which could happen at a private boys' school in the 1970s when one student decides to flout the system" is to confuse setting with substance and plot device with purpose.

Cormier persistently...