Go Jump in the Pool! is the second book in the MacDonald Hall series, started by Gordon Korman when he was just twelve years old. This book was published when Korman was just 16 years old, and is one of the funniest he has ever written!
Summary
At the beginning of the book, the MacDonald Hall swim team gets destroyed by their rivals from York Academy because MacDonald Hall doesn’t have a pool. Although Bruno and Boots (the main characters) are able to get back at the “turkeys,” trouble is starting mount. Although MacDonald Hall is the number one academic school, some parents are thinking of switching their kids over to York Academy; including Boots!
Of course Bruno isn’t going to have any of that. He immediately sets about trying to get a pool for their school. The only problem: It costs $25,000.
That doesn’t deter Bruno, though. He’s not about to let his best friends become turkeys. He sets out to raise the money, enlisting the help of their friends Cathy and Diane from Miss Scrimmage’s Finishing School for Young Ladies, which is across the road. Bruno comes out with ideas such as having a bake sale, a talent show, and trying to set a world record. However, $25,000 is hard to come by.
Review
This book is hilarious all the way throughout. Bruno and Cathy are awesome characters, and there is no telling what they are going to do next. Go Jump in the Pool! shows boys and girls of incredible determination and spirit trying to save themselves and their friends.
This book, like many of Korman’s (especially his early ones), is not exactly realistic; it is instead quite rollicking and crazy, but this is exactly the point. There is not one event in the book that you could call impossible; all of them could happen, it’s just that the likelihood is about a million to one. There aren’t a lot of books like that which tell stories that are quite unlikely and yet you believe they could be real.
Although $25,000 is a lot today, it’s interesting to think what it would have been in 1979 when this book was written. $25,000 back then would be worth $82,000 today, a pretty incredible sum.
Reading the first book is a good starter to this one, but the truth is that not reading it won’t hurt your enjoyment of this story at all. Nevertheless, once you read of these books you’ll definitely want to read all of them! They’re that good.
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