By Gordon Korman
The school's worst bully falls off a roof, loses his memory, and gets to decide whether to become that person again.
Chase Ambrose wakes up in a hospital with no idea who he is. He soon learns: eighth-grade football star, and the child everyone at school is terrified of. As his memory stays blank, the pieces come back from the outside, some children flinch when they see him, a few light up, and one boy who left for a whole other school starts breathing easier now that Chase can't remember what he did to him. Chase gets the rarest thing a person can get, a clean slate, and the whole book is the question of what he'll build on it. Told in short chapters that hand the mic around the school, so your child hears from the children Chase hurt, the ones who idolized him, and Chase himself, all trying to work out whether a person can really change.
This is the discussion book that runs itself, because the whole room will want to argue about whether Chase deserves a second chance. Korman keeps the chapters short and the voices switching, which pulls in even the children who say they don't read, and gives a book club built-in sides to take, the victim who can't forgive, the friends who want the old Chase back, Chase caught in the middle. It's funny and fast, so the big questions about guilt, forgiveness, and who we really are go down easy. And because so much of the cruelty is looked back on rather than lived through, a group can talk hard about bullying without a heavy scene sitting on the table.