The Shadow Club is a book written by Neal Shusterman about two middle school students, Jared Mercer and Cheryl Gannett, who see themselves as the "second best" students in their school at the activities that they do best. They form a club called the Shadow Club, consisting of other students who also consider themselves to be "in the shadows" of people who are better than them at the things they are good at. They start out by pulling pranks to humiliate their enemies, the "unbeatables," but after another student, Tyson McGaw, catches them at one of their meetings, they decide to lay low to keep suspicion off themselves in case he tells people about their meetings. Despite their plan to stop playing pranks until someone really deserves it, much nastier things begin happening to the "unbeatable" kids. The Shadow Club is convinced that Tyson is playing the tricks to frame them, and they begin terrorizing him for revenge and to try to make him confess to the pranks, almost driving him to suicide.
Famous quotes containing the words shadow and/or club:
“Yet there is a mystery here and it is not one that I understand: without the sting of otherness, of—even—the vicious, without the terrible energies of the underside of health, sanity, sense, then nothing works or can work. I tell you that goodness-what we in our ordinary daylight selves call goodness: the ordinary, the decent—these are nothing without the hidden powers that pour forth continually from their shadow sides. Their hidden aspects contained and tempered.”
—Doris Lessing (b. 1919)
“At first, it must be remembered, that [women] can never accomplish anything until they put womanhood ahead of wifehood, and make motherhood the highest office on the social scale.”
—“Jennie June” Croly 1829–1901, U.S. founder of the woman’s club movement, journalist, author, editor. Demorest’s Illustrated Monthly and Mirror of Fashions, pp. 24-5 (January 1870)