The Readers and Writers Paradise

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.

By 2003 Gordon Korman was already transitioning into writing adventure books, but he certainly still had a lot jokes in him, and he had some more ideas to make readers laugh. The result was Maxx Comedy: The Funniest Kid in America.

Summary

Maxx Comedy is about a kid named Max Carmody who loves comedy so much he wants to go into it as a career. The only problem is that he’s not really that funny.

When he hears about a contest for the funniest kid in America, however, Max is psyched. He know he needs to go, and he makes his stepdad promise to take him there. First, however, he needs to ensure a spot in the thirty finalists by his audition tape. Of course, he enlists the help of his best friends, Maude, Big, and Syndi.

Each of them have their quirks: Syndi wants to be on the student council but is always making Amanda Locke mad. Big is huge and has some kind of a weird medical condition so he’s always humming out his nose. And Maude is a perpetual complainer, always happy to tell anybody who will listen that the worst stuff always happens to her.

The plot of the story goes crazy in a lot of directions, typical of Korman’s style at the time. Some of the things that happen include the purchase of an $85 pair of pants bought with stolen money that rips, a dog that is taken in by the kids’ class in an attempt to impress the student council and get on TV but gets exchanged with a panther, and a mooing sound that makes Max national news.

Review

Despite the fact that this has many of the aspects of a classic Korman comedy, it fails to live up to his standards, and is truthfully not a very impressive book. It reminds me a lot of Radio Fifth Grade, written a decade earlier, except that everything is wrong. Instead of a dedicated radiocaster like Benjy, we have Max who can barely tell a joke to save his life. Instead of a smart, practical girl like Ellen we have bumbling idiots like Maude and Syndi.

The characters in this book simply don’t make all that much sense, and it doesn’t add up. In classic Korman books like the MacDonald Hall series, we loved characters like Bruno, Cathy, and the Fish. In this book, there is no one to love. We don’t get to know the characters, and they are so either weird or surface level that doing so doesn’t seem possible.

I like that the plot is crazy and full of rollicking fun, but even the use of Korman’s classic scene at the end where everything comes together doesn’t do it for this book. Sure, some of the stuff is funny. But for most of the book the primary attitude is confusion. The characters and story are simply not identifiable and therefore we are relegated to observing the action from the vantage point of an observer who doesn’t really understand, instead of living it excitedly along with the characters like we have come to expect from this author. This book is nice, but if you’re looking for a Korman book there are much better options.