Don’t Get Caught by Kurt Dinan | goldfish and gatorade

10:00 tonight at the water tower. Tell no one. -Chaos Club

When Max receives a mysterious invite from the untraceable, epic prank-pulling Chaos Club, he has to ask: why him? After all, he’s Mr. 2.5 GPA, Mr. No Social Life. He’s Just Max. And his favorite heist movies have taught him this situation calls for Rule #4: Be suspicious. But it’s also his one shot to leave Just Max in the dust…

Yeah, not so much. Max and four fellow students-who also received invites-are standing on the newly defaced water tower when campus security “catches” them. Definitely a setup. And this time, Max has had enough. It’s time for Rule #7: Always get payback.

Let the prank war begin. (Synopsis taken from Goodreads)

I was pleasantly surprised to find how fun this book was. I mean, yeah, I expected it to be fun, but in a more stupid way. This wasn’t a stupid book. I laughed out loud a couple of times, and that’s hard to get me to do.

And, normally I hate the little things that say stuff like “John Green meets Rainbow Rowell” or “Hunger Games meets Throne of Glass” or whatever else (or, with this book, it was Ocean 11 meets The Breakfast Club), but in this case, it fit. I can’t speak for the Ocean 11 part of it, but it did have a very Breakfast Club-y vibe to it. The characters especially made the Breakfast Club connection. Everyone has a reason for wanting to get back at the Chaos Club. And everyone in this book wants to write their name in the wet cement of the universe.

What I liked:

-It’s being released on April Fool’s Day! I thought that was kind of fun.

-The pranks are (mostly) actually pretty smart. There are no TPing of people’s cars or gluing people to their chairs or whatever other somewhat stupid pranks tend to happy during a prank war.

-The characters were all Breakfast Club-like tropes, but they also defied the tropes in a way. Max was “the brain”, but he wasn’t a straight-A student. Ellie was “the princess”, but she had somewhat of a vicious streak, and tended to take things a little bit too far. Stuff like that.

-The writing didn’t drag at all. Sometimes with books like this, there will be the parts in the middle where you kind of have to slog through a chapter or two because nothing interesting is happening. This wasn’t like that.

But, yes, I did have some problems with it.

What I didn’t like:

-A lot of the humor is sexual, and I just don’t like that kind of humor.

-There was a couple of parts that felt unnecessarily icky. Like, one of the girls, Malone, sent a private picture to a boy, which the boy then distributed to the entire school. And the main character, Max, kept the picture for months. No. That is not something you should do. And, more than that, to keep it for months? That was unnecessary to the book and really gross.

-There’s some flawed logic behind the pranks. It shouldn’t be that easy to call the Secret Service. If you put that much ipecac in something- sweet sports drink or no -you would be able to taste it. Things like that.

-For an organization that relies on being anonymous, and only members know who other members are…the newest members reveal themselves pretty easily, without a lot of guilt.

-And, call this nit-picky, but I had a problem with Max, Ellie, Malone, Wheeler and Adleta marking their pranks with a Water Tower 5 logo. Yes, it was said that Wheeler made it small, but anyone who examines the cards too closely would notice it (AKA, anyone who gives the card more than a passing glance), and it would lead right to those five. They were supposedly pulling those pranks for more than half the school year. Someone should have noticed.

So, yeah. This wasn’t an awesome, utterly amazing book, but it was pretty entertaining. A good, fun weekend read.

DON’T GET CAUGHT COMES OUT APRIL FIRST, 2016, AND IS PUBLISHED BY SOURCEBOOKS FIRE. I RECEIVED A FREE COPY IN EXCHANGE FOR AN HONEST REVIEW.

My first ever ARC (so exciting!). Is this book on any of you guy’s TBR list? Is it now? Do you like books with a Breakfast Club vibe, or not so much?

Happy Wednesday,