Common Sense Note
Parents should know that this is exactly the kind of book you hope your kids will find and love -- showing the best examples of kids and adults behaving in caring, intelligent, and positive ways.
Discussion topics include the more-complex-than-usual look at the acquisition of money, relationships, and school politics.
Common Sense Review
Reviewed By: Matt Berman
Nobody else seems to be able to do what Andrew Clements does: he takes the environment that is most familiar and meaningful to children, school, and writes stories that take place there in language so clear and lively that even inexperienced and reluctant readers can blaze through it in a haze of pleasure, yet so packed with intellectual depth, emotional power, and understanding of the human heart that each of his books rockets to the top of favorite read-aloud and discussion group lists all over the country. The fact that he has not yet been awarded a Newbery says more about the sad state of that award than it does about his books.
This story is remarkable as much for what it doesn't have as for what it does: suspense without villains, humor without pandering, excitement without violence, independent children without killing off the adults or making them all morons. It has a rich and developing relationship between Greg and Maura and a complex view of money and school politics. And then it adds something that hardly anyone else seems to know how to do anymore -- pure, unadulterated delight (think of books such as The Secret Garden, with which it has several interesting similiarities). Each event in the story falls into place in the same way that notes in a song resolve to the tonic -- not always when or how you expect them to, but always (at least in the best music) in a way that resonates through your whole being, and leaves your whole body humming even when the music is done.
C.S. Lewis, in his Perelandra trilogy, describes creatures called Eldila, whose bearings are so straight and true that they make everything else seem just a bit off, as if they are somehow attuned to the actual reality and everything else just to the shadows on the cave wall. Clements' books are like that, as if they are depicting a reality somehow more resonant with what we know in our hearts to be true than with our normal daily lives. They are at once completely realistic, and yet somehow so much more satisfying.
From the Book:
So on that day in April of his fifth-grade year, Greg had started looking around the cafeteria, and everywhere he looked, he saw quarters. He saw kids trading quarters for ice-cream sandwiches and cupcakes and cookies at the dessert table. He saw kids over at the school store trading quarters for neon pens and sparkly pencils, and for little decorations like rubber soccer balls and plastic butterflies to stick onto the ends of those new pencils. He saw Albert Hobart drop three quarters into a machine so he could have a cold can of juice with his lunch. Kids were buying extra food, fancy pens and pencils, special drinks and snacks. There were quarters all over the place, buckets of them. ...
Excited, Greg had started making some calculations in his head -- another one his talents. There were about 450 fourth, fifth, and sixth graders at Ashworth Intermediate School. If even half of those kids had two extra quarters to spend every day, then there had to be at least four hundred quarters floating around the school. That was a hundred dollars a day, over five hundred dollars each week -- money, extra money, just jingling around in pockets and lunch bags!
At that moment Greg's view of school changed completely and forever. School had suddenly become the most interesting place on the planet. Because young Greg Kenton had decided that school would be an excellent place to make his fortune.
Plot Summary:
Greg has always loved money, and he's good at getting lots of it. Since he was very small he has done chores and odd jobs, first at home, then around the neighborhood. Now in sixth grade he has realized that he has been sitting on a gold mine all along -- school. School is the place where kids with money gather every day, and Greg intends to get a good sized piece of the action.
At first he tries selling candy and toys, but the school soon puts a stop to that, and he can understand why. But when he starts writing, illustrating, and printing his own comic books and selling them, the principal puts a stop to that too, and that seems less fair. Equally unfair is that his lifelong enemy, Maura, has once again copied his idea. But perhaps it takes a pair of enemies to challenge the system.
Related Books:
Other Books by Andrew Clements
Frindle
The Landry News
The School Story
The Janitor's Boy
Things Not Seen
The Jacket
A Week in the Woods
The Report Card
The Last Holiday Concert
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ViolenceAn accidental black eye and bloody nose. |
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Social BehaviorGreg and Maura grow out of their childish competitiveness and learn to treat each other decently. |
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CommercialismSeveral products, including candy, soda, and sportswear brands, are mentioned, but mostly as examples of the ways kids are marketed to. |
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