Book Review
Writing Popular Fiction for Children
- Gordon Korman (Author)
I Want to Go Home. Scholastic (purchase at Amazon.ca)
- Gordon Korman (Author)
Lights, Camera, Disaster!. Scholastic (purchase at Amazon.ca - Gordon Korman (Author)
Son of the Mob. Scholastic (purchase at Amazon.ca - Gordon Korman (Author)
The Zucchini Warriors. Scholastic (purchase at Amazon.ca
Reviewed by Carol Acton
The four books under review are by Gordon Korman, yet I would never have linked the author of the predictable and boring The Zucchini Warriors, Lights, Camera, Action (Macdonald Hall series) and I Want to Go Home with the witty, fast-paced, and sympathetic Son of the Mob.
Let’s get the worst of the initial three out of the way first. I Want to Go Home is the clichéed camp story of the child who doesn’t fit in and is determined to run away. In spite of an attempt to subvert the genre by refusing to let the child conform and instead forcing the camp to change, everything in this book, from ‘characters’ to the representation of the camp, is so stereotyped that it produces no more than a yawn. As a reviewer I struggled to the end, otherwise I wouldn’t have bothered to go further than the first couple of pages.
Korman’s MacDonald Hall series is enormously popular with the ten-something crowd, and these books do deliver a fast-paced plot in a school environment where the students rather than the teachers are in control. As an avid reader of children’s series books in my childhood, I understand the lure of the repetition of the same characters and similar plot lines. However, the problem with these books is that the characters are too sketchily drawn to do more than move the predictable plot forward. If part of the attraction is liking the characters enough to want to read a series, then neither The Zucchini Warriors nor Lights, Camera, Disaster! delivers. Even my best attempts at suspending adult judgement were not successful in making me care about any of the characters or the ultimate outcome. Even at the level of light children’s reading there is nothing to recommend these books. In fact they insult the intelligence of the average ten-year-old reader and thus suggest that children are not worth writing well for. That is unforgivable.
Coming to Son of the Mob after the mind-numbing predictability of Korman’s other books under review was therefore a pleasant surprise. This is light reading at its best. The opening chapter sets the stage for the rest of the book; it is at once laughing-out-loud funny and at the same time draws the reader into empathetic identification with the central character, Vince Luca, and his dilemma: how to live as a normal teenager while being the unwilling “son of the mob.” Korman sustains the momentum of witty one-liners and comic situations throughout the story, while deftly leading us through Vince’s adolescent attempts to conduct a love affair with the daughter of the local FBI agent at the same time as he inadvertently becomes involved with the mob even as he struggles to reject it.
There is plenty of teen angst here as well as humour. The obvious problems that attend youthful romance such as dating and meeting the parents, as well as the need to define an identity separate from one’s family, are handled sympathetically while maintaining the humour promised in the opening. Korman’s achievement here is to make us care about Vince as much as we might care for a character in a more serious novel. At the same time, he manages a wickedly funny send-up of the idea of the mob ‘family’ that carries with it an undercurrent of darkness. No glamour attaches to the mob; in fact the sleeziness of the underworld is all too apparent. Yet Vince must move warily between the revelations he uncovers about the mob and his affection for his family. While we may reasonably predict Vince’s ultimate escape from these dilemmas to a happy ending, there are enough twists and turns on the way to keep us interested and amused.
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MLA: Acton, Carol. Writing Popular Fiction for Children. canlit.ca. Canadian Literature, 8 Dec. 2011. Web. 18 May 2013.
This review originally appeared in Canadian Literature #187 (Winter 2005), Littérature francophone hors-Québec / Francophone Writing Outside Quebec. (pg. 141 - 142)
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