Gordon Korman

I’ve been super excited for the release of Gordon Korman’s new book Masterminds. Actually, it’s the first book in a trilogy, and it’s one of Korman’s action series. Like almost everything he writes, it’s very well done and captures the reader all the way through.

Summary

The book starts innocuously enough in Serenity, a very small town in New Mexico where everything is perfect. There’s no crime in Serenity, no problems. Everyone works at the local factory, which is supposed to manufacture traffic-cones. All the kids go to a nice school, where they take classes like Contentment, and most never leave the town.

Korman switches around narrators in this book, a tactic he’s used in both No More Dead Dogs and Schooled to great success. It allows us to get to know all the main characters and also to follow the story from multiple angles because Korman always likes to throw in crazy events that snowball together into a big explosion…often a literal one.

We start out with Eli Frieden, son of the mayor of Serenity and best friends with Randy. Randy and he are always getting into all kinds of trouble, playing all sorts of fun and crazy stunts. Something weird happens, though, when the two venture outside of city limits and Eli has a health collapse.

This is where we meet the Purple People Eaters, or security guys who run around the town who nobody knows. The big question is: Why does a town as safe as Serenity need that kind of thing? The kids are so sheltered they don’t know what a murder or crime even is.

Soon after they exit the town limits, however, Randy gets sent out of town. Eli knows something is fishy, and he enlists the help of a nice girl named Tori Pritel, and soon join forces with the rebellious Mailk (who always says he’s going to leave Serenity as soon as he can), Hector (Malik’s best friend who is really timid), and eventually Tori’s best friend Amber, a girl who rigidly defends the town of Serenity.

By more weird events happening, it isn’t long before the kids realize that something very strange is going on in the town. And that something could mean great danger for them.

Review

This is an awesome book. The science-fiction plot twist Korman pulls is excellent, and gets you really engrossed in the story. The kids have to work almost entirely on their own, going completely against the entire population of the rest of the town, and that’s something worth reading.

The characters are all very identifiable, although none of them is personally super deep or inspiring like some characters in other Korman books. What draws you in about them is that they think for themselves and they’re courageous, having to go totally against everything they’ve ever been taught and believed with only themselves to trust, so in that way they are inspiring.

This book reminds me a lot of the excellent Running Out of Time by Margaret Peterson Haddix in terms of them both having a fake town. The Haddix book had crazy plot twists till the very end but was also a more morally straight forward. Masterminds pushes the envelope of ambiguous morality in a lot of different directions, and I expect to see it tackle a lot of hard questions and events that would naturally come from this story.

I respect that Korman is writing some more science fiction type stories just to get into new stuff. I totally understand that as a writer, and Korman’s been a published author more than twice as long as I’ve been on the planet! So it’s good that he’s experimenting with new stuff, but his themes of kids doing great stuff and taking matters into their own hands is what sticks throughout his books and makes them so worth reading.

With all of that said, I cannot recommend this book right now for one very important reason: The series won’t be completed for another two years! It’s crazy, I know. This book was 322 pages, unlike other Korman trilogies where a single book would be little more than a third of that. Nevertheless, I wish they would come out with books more quickly, and Korman has said he’s writing them as quickly as he can but it’s the publisher’s decision. Of course I still wanted to read the book now, but it’s kind of ridiculous to expect kids to read a book and then a whole year for book two and then another year for the conclusion. Nevertheless, I congratulate Korman on another very engrossing book and I’ll be waiting for February, 2016.

Don’t Care High by Gordon Korman is a wickedly good book, written back in 1985 when he was twenty two years old, just fresh out of college, and at around the height of his writing powers. It’s his first foray into Young Adult, but be prepared to be laughing up a storm and thinking about this book for a long time to come.

Summary

The book begins when Paul moves from “the boonies,” as his dad calls it, to the Big Apple. He’s going to school at Don Carey High School, but it’s not like any school he’s gone to before. In fact, the students have dubbed it Don’t Care High School because nobody cares. There is no interest or participation in anything. Students don’t care about having schedule mix-ups like five of the same foreign language class in a day or even having no schedule at all! The sign-up sheets on the walls are from the 1940s, and there are no sports teams or student government or anything like that.

Paul is lucky to meet Sheldon, however, a kid who just might actually care. He only transferred to the school in the middle of the previous year, so he still has a little ambition. For fun, he decides to get a kid named Mike Otis elected as school president, which is easy because no one else is running and the kid won’t even mind.

Unsurprisingly Mike wins, but he doesn’t do anything with his power. That’s up to Sheldon and Paul. Sheldon begins giving Mike credit for all the repairs and other nice things happening at the school, earning him a lot of popularity among students, even though they had nothing to do with it. When the school hears about it and removes Mike from president, though, then they’ve really done it. Mike is their president, and they’re going to do anything he says (or more accurately, anything Sheldon and Paul say he says).

Review

This is a fantastic book. The characters are awesome and real, with funny dialects and nicknames. There’s a kid named Wayne-O whose mission is to see how little he can be at every class and still pass. There’s a hilarious kid named Feldstein who is the locker baron of the school. He owns many of the lockers, and (until Mike Otis’s rise) is the most powerful kid in the school. He can deny you a locker if he wants, and in exchange for a locker you owe him food that you may have to give him at a time in the future of his choosing.

Paul’s family is off the wall, with a crazy aunt, a mother who is always going to take care of her, and a dad who doesn’t see him much until he decides to teach him New York City driving (even though it’s illegal to drive in New York until you’re 18 and Paul is only 16). There is a hilarious radio program led by Flash Food, who relishes talking about the inconveniences of “the greatest city in the world.” There are also insane neighbors who Paul watches and observes but doesn’t understand, a TV character named Steve who inspires him, and risk-taking (but accident avoiding) cabbies.

The best character, though, is Mike Otis. Despite being the most popular kid in school, he doesn’t understand a thing of what is going on. His school records are of buildings, phone numbers, and past addresses that don’t exist. His car is said not to be made by any known manufacture. What is with this guy?

Gordon Korman moved from Canada to New York to attend film school, and the theme of the Big Apple recurs in a few of his books. The theme of a tribute to New York and all its craziness is present throughout the book, right down to the end.

This book has Korman’s classic pairing of two best-friends, one of whom is crazy and adventuresome and the other who is more cautious, but goes along with it anyways. Sheldon is the crazy one, and Paul the more cautious. Sheldon does come up with some really outrageous ideas, and the combination works great in this book.

The only negative thing about this book is that kids who have read a lot of Korman’s books will notice that many other jokes found later in his books were simply copied from this one. Mike Smith, in The 6th Grade Nickname Gang, is Mike Otis with a slight name change and about a thousand times less mysterious and heroic. Schooled also has an election won by someone who is unsuspectingly nominated, and the school in that book is named C Average Middle School instead of Claverage Middle School. There are probably others, but the fact is that many of Korman’s jokes in later books were originally used in his earlier ones, where they are often deeper and even more funny and powerful.

Don’t Care High is a hilarious book that will also make you think. You’ll be laughing up a storm, but you also just won’t forget characters like Feldstein or Mike Otis. Don’t Care High students at the beginning probably wouldn’t have cared about a book written about them, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t!

Get Don’t Care High from Amazon

Before Gordon Korman got into the adventure books he writes today, he was a comedy writer, famous for forcing kids to read books in private on account of laughing so hard. The Toilet Paper Tigers is one of Korman’s hilarious books, with tons of jokes, memorable characters, and a great surprise ending.

Summary

The story is told in the first person by Corey Johnson, a kid who wants to have some fun by joining a baseball team during the summer. Unfortunately for him, he gets stuck on a team with a bunch of rejects and a coach in Professor Pendergast who doesn’t have a clue about baseball. He only became coach so his visiting granddaughter, Kristy, would be able to make some friends.

Kristy, though only a twelve year-old girl, is from New York, putting her far above the Tigers, who merely live in Texas. She quickly gains leverage on them by snapping a photo of them in their underwear or worse, and uses this to bribe the team to do whatever she wants. She becomes the real coach and begins working to get the team into playing shape.

At the beginning of the season they can barely get one hit in a whole game, but Kristy goes one by one to make the players play better. She forces one kid onto a diet, ruins the life of another kids’ older brother so he’ll stop picking on him, and even tries hypnosis on one player.

Although Corey objects to Kristy’s tyrannical ways, his letter to the head of the little league for some reason goes unheeded and he is forced to live under her reign. She becomes popular, however, when they start getting better and eventually begin to pile up wins.

In the end the built has a couple of twists, including a crazy one I definitely would never have seen coming. Korman’s later book, Jake ReInvented, has an extremely similar twist as the theme and I am sure it originally came from this book.

Review

Although I have heard people say that Korman is better at third person than first person books, this one is definitely an exception. We get to know the characters and live right along with them. Kristy’s New York slang is hilarious, ranging from her frequent reference to “the reality sandwich,” to calling her grandfather “my main man P.P.”

Her actions are just as crazy, and she easily manages to dominate anyone she wants, including a motorcycle gang. As one of her victims puts it, “Some people curse you out, maybe give you dirty looks, maybe even pick a fight. Her? She ruins your life!”

The other characters have fun stories, and we never know what is going to happen when Kristy sets out to cure them. The most surprising thing in the book, however, is the truth about Kristy herself.

It was kind of surprising to me how far the baseball team did end up going. I was sure a couple of times that Korman would let the team end short of the championship, but he keeps pushing it all the way for the glory. Some people call it predictable, but it is actually unpredictable because it is too predictable to think that an author would actually do it! Either way, it’s fun.

This is one of Korman’s best books, and right in the middle of when he was full swing into comedy. Great jokes are sprinkled throughout almost as afterthoughts, and middle grade boys will find themselves laughing throughout this baseball tale.

Liar, Liar Pants on Fire is Gordon Korman’s shortest book by far, aimed at younger readers and clocking in at a mere eighty-six pages including illustrations. While Korman typically writes books just to be enjoyed, this is a rare exception as the book preaches the virtues of not lying throughout.

Summary

The book is told in the first person by Zoe, a third grader who is having a really hard time. The problem is that she doesn’t feel like she knows anything or has anything to really talk about, so she makes up really outrageous lies in an attempt to seem important among her classmates.

Of course, her lies are ridiculous and everyone knows they aren’t true a mile away. She gets in big trouble and nobody likes her, but she is able to make her first friend when she stops telling constant lies with the help of her teacher and her dad, himself a former fibber.

Review

This is my least favorite Gordon Korman book, and I don’t recommend it. Even though I love most of his works, this is certainly not a book he wrote to be enjoyed. Sure, there are some funny and crazy things that happen like in any Korman book, but really the point of the book is you don’t have to make up lies because you are valuable just as yourself.

Korman usually excels at providing extremely inspiring messages in his plotlines. In his recent Swindle Series, for example, Griffin and the gang are always trying to do what is right (even if it may be slightly or even highly illegal), but he never directly says a word about it. In hilarious books such as I Want to Go Home! his characters are extremely inspiring, but there is no deliberate attempt on the authors’ part to tell us anything about what we should do.

Liar, Liar Pants on Fire is a book that almost anyone could’ve easily written. I am confident that I could easily write it better, and I know I am not near the level of genius Korman has reached with some of his other books. The whole thing of the book is that Zoe tells a bunch of lies at the beginning and nobody likes her, and when she decides to stop lying her life gets better. This is the type of the book that I really don’t like now and would’ve been disgusted with as a kid. Korman is a great writer, but for his good work look elsewhere.