By Gordon Korman
Amazon rating: 4.7/5, grades 4-7
Good Reads: 3.96/5
Common Sense Media: book not reviewed
4Rbooks: 2/6, grades 6-8
252 pages
Synopsis:
Griffin and his friend Ben spend the night in an abandoned home where Griffin finds a rare baseball card. He hopes that this will solve all his family’s money problems and they won’t have to move. He takes the card to a local sports dealer who convinces him it’s not that rare and only gives him $120 for it. Griffin later sees the dealer on TV bragging about the card and putting it up for auction anticipating hundreds of thousands of dollars in return.
Griffin realizes he has been swindled and devises a plan to get the card back. With the help of his best friend Ben and a crew of children with special skills (a climber, a hacker, a dog whisperer, and muscle) they set out to steal the card and make themselves rich.
Of course, nothing ever works as planned and there are roadblocks and obstacles at every turn. Can Griffin’s crew trust each other, and work together to solve each and every problem.
Parental Guidance: medium
The book begins with Griffin and Ben lying to their parents to spend the
night camping out in an abandoned, soon to be demolished, house.
During their night in the house, they shared local folklore about the house
including a woman who was murdered with either a chainsaw, or an ice pick to
her head.
The entire plot of the book involves a group of 11-year-olds who work
together to steal back a rare baseball card from a dishonest dealer. It includes
breaking into a store, and someone’s home.
Recommendation:
From a pure storyteller standpoint this is a decent enough story that should appeal to most students, particularly boys. I can’t in good conscience recommend this book except under careful guidance of a teacher or parent. The entire story revolves around a group of students who set out to break into buildings and steal a baseball card that doesn’t legally belong to anyone. Griffin can be upset that he was swindled, but it was disconcerting that at no time does he or his crew truly rationalize what they are about to do. They worry about the consequences if caught, but never the moral implications.
While I doubt this book would turn anyone into a cat burglar, I just can’t approve of the premise. Apparently Mr. Korman has turned this into a series with 7 more books and it was made into a movie for Nickleodeon.
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