Julian F. Thompson (1)

Five high schoolers are sent to (what they think) is a boarding school to get them on the right track. All of them have committed some type of misbehavior that has lead their parents to send them away--but none of them would have suspected that they were meant to be poisoned and thrown into a deep crevasse! No one expected Group 6 and their (young) advisor to make it back from their orientation camping trip alive...

While this book will seem fairly dated for today's reader, it is a lot of fun to re-visit if you read this in the 80s as a kid or teen. This is also a chilling story about parents wanting to have their children eliminated which may be a nice companion to a book like Neal Shusterman's Unwind (however Shusterman's world is infinitely scarier). There is some appeal for male readers in The Grounding of Group 6 as much of the story is revealed from the teen boy characters including quite a few (tame) passages about their sexual experiences.… (meer)

Meh. This was neither as suspenseful or as funny as I'd thought it would be. The premise -- five teens are told they're going to a fancy boarding school when in fact their parents are going to have them killed -- is arresting and disturbingly plausible. But I did not find the book realistic and it seemed to drag on and on. The protagonists basically meandered from one action to the next, and the ending was far too neat and tidy for my taste. It bothered me that [SPOILER ALERT] the parents were never really punished for their actions.

It was a great idea but very poorly executed.… (meer)