Nothing is as it seems in an idyllic little town
Things start going badly for Eli Frieden the day he and his best friend, Randy Hardaway, set out to find the old, abandoned Alfa Romeo Randy and his dad spotted on one of their recent bike rides. All is fine until the 13-year-old boys bicycle past the town limits of Serenity, N.M., and Eli immediately becomes deathly ill upon leaving town for the first time in his life. Ominously, a military-style helicopter with members of the Surety – a security force for the Serenity Plastic Works, the town’s chief employer — swoops down on the boys. Before they know what has hit them, Eli is at home, being drugged by the local doctor and his father, and Randy gets expelled from the seemingly perfect town in which he’s lived all his life.
The town of Serenity is a key player in this novel. With a population of 185 (184 once Randy is sent away), 30 of whom are kids (okay, now 29), it is like no other town. Crime is unknown here; in fact, when Eli’s classmate Amber Laska sees the word “murder” in a copy of USA Today brought into Serenity by visiting tree pruners, she asks the men what it means. At this point, about 30 pages into the book, I start having trouble suspending disbelief. After all, the story is set in the present; Amber and her friends might only have access to Pax, the local paper with its bland and upbeat “news,” but they have television and the Internet. How could she not know the definition of murder?
More and more questions cropped up as I read, and it wasn’t until about a third of the way into Gordon Korman’s latest novel that I began to get answers — and to realize that maybe the publisher’s bumf about this being a humour-filled page-turner of an adventure story might actually be all those things. It’s the first volume in a series and, having made it to the end of the book in record time, I am now thoroughly hooked on the six main characters and the difficult situation in which they find themselves. Detailing the well-crafted plot twists here would spoil it for readers; without letting too many cats out of the bag, let me just say that I’m eagerly awaiting Book 2.
Fifty-one-year-old Korman, born in Montreal and raised in Ontario but now living south of the border, wrote his first novel when he was 12 and had it published two years later. This Can’t be Happening at Macdonald Hall started as a school assignment but ended up launching a middlegrade series that quickly gained him loyal young fans; he now has more than 80 middle-grade and teen novels to his name. Masterminds is aimed at readers age 8 to 12, but given some key plot developments, I’d feel more comfortable with a slightly older audience. The brand of humour Korman ascribes to his young characters is certainly fine for 8-year-olds, but the psychological and sociological nuances that helped bring those characters into existence seem to me food for thought that’s more appropriate for an older reader.
Ages 9 to 13
Masterminds By Gordon Korman HarperCollins, 323 pages, $17.99