On Tuesday, April 16, Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School’s book club received second place in their first competition of the school year, “Battle of the Books.” The club competed against eleven other schools at the Broward County Library and lost to Coral Springs High School by one point.

“We didn’t deserve second place. During the tie breaker we had an exact answers and the other team did not but [the prompter] accepted it. When the next question came we did not give the exact answer but the closest one and [the prompter] did not accept it and said the other team won,” junior Teyenne Jonca said.

All of the teams competed against each other at once. A prompter would read out a quote from one of the 15 books the teams had read throughout the school year and the schools would have ten seconds to talk amongst themselves and put up a card with the name of the book the quote was from. Each correct answer was worth one point and at the end of the rounds the teams with the least amount of points was eliminated. After the three, twenty minute rounds, MSD and Coral Springs High School went into a tie breaker round.

“For each round we had to [identify as many quotes] as we could in the twenty minute time frame,” senior Pinaki Upadhyay said. “However, the tie breaker round was not made of quotes but actual questions.”

The competition was based of the fifteen books on the Florida Teen Reader’s List. The clubs knew the basics of the questions beforehand as all the coaches sent out practice quotes two weeks in advance.

“Each coach got a book to pull quotes from then they put all of them together to form practice questions.” junior Sydney Ekerr said. “ I’m hopefully that next year we’ll get them about a month or more before hand so that we’ll have more time to practice and a definite chance to win”