Gordon Korman. Slacker. Scholastic P, 2016.
———. Notorious. Balzer, 2020.

I sometimes wonder if I had been a middle schooler fifteen years ago and were a Gordon Korman fan back then, would I still be reading his stuff now? I don’t know, but we have been reading him, with an occasional audio book, for a number of years and we still enjoy him. Slacker does not disappoint.

Cameron “Cam” Boxer is the slacker of the title. He has curated or cultivated that slacker lifestyle since he was young. All he wants to do is play video games. He has concentrated mostly on Rule the World and its upcoming convention with actual prize money.

Except when he is online, he is anonymous. The guidance counselors at Sycamore Middle School do not know who he is. He gets C‘s with an occasional B, so he stays out of academic trouble both at home and school. With his two friends Chuck and Pavel, he forms the Awesome Threesome, a gaming team that is hard to beat. His only problem comes in the form of a player from Toronto whose avatar in the game is called Evil McKillPeople.

Life was going along just fine for this eighth grade gamer until one day—and we have all done this—his mother tells him to do something, and he says, “Yeah,” but he is too engrossed in his video game to really know what she said. Only this time she asked him to take the lasagna out of the oven after ten minutes while the rest of his family goes out. An hour later, still battling Evil McKillPeople, he hears the fire department coming through the front door after chopping it open with an ax.

Yes, he is in big trouble. He is in danger of losing his video game console. Cam, though, is creative, even if up to this point most of his creativity has been worked out on alien planets. With the help of Pavel, who is a true hacker, he hacks on to the Sycamore Middle School web site and posts a web page for a new extracurricular club—the Positive Action Group, or P.A.G.—with Cam listed as president and contact person. That should keep his parents off his back.

It is, of course, totally fake. It is just there for his parents. The signup link takes anyone who tries it to a web page seeking donations for rain forest preservation.

At least the P.A.G. starts out fake until a few students and guidance counselor Mr. Fanshaw discover the web page. Pretty soon Cam finds out that he actually has to do something!

Cam’s attempts to avoid doing anything with this organization are quite impressive, but, as Shakespeare wrote, “Some have greatness thrust upon them.” With Mr. Fanshaw’s urging, Cam gets a group of volunteers to help clean up around a senior citizen housing complex in town. A local newspaper reporter shows up to record this when Cam, trying to hide from everyone in a stairwell, discovers one of the elderly residents unconscious. 911 whisks her off in an ambulance, Cam is a hero, and now over half the school wants to join the P.A.G.

One of the first joiners is Daphne, who is worried about a lone beaver in town named Elvis. There used to be a beaver colony in town until construction of a new mall began next to the beaver stream. The beavers all moved out except for Elvis, who was apparently too old to travel much.

Another early joiner is Freeland “the String” McBean. He is a star football player who has been sidelined until his grades improve. Then there is Xavier, the leather-jacketed hoodlum who is almost old enough to drive but still in eighth grade. After the publicity the club gets, both candidates for Student Council President join.

Cam has created a monster. A helpful monster, but a monster nevertheless.

To complicate things, the leader of the high school service organization, Friends of Fuzzy, gets bent out of shape because the middle school service group is getting all the attention. She, her boyfriend, and some others begin to sabotage the activities of the P.A.G. after Cam shrugs off their threats.

Cam has been in his own little world. In some ways he is still in it, but the outside world has imposed itself on his lifestyle. He can no longer simply slack off playing video games.

Typical of Korman, there is a lot of humor. There is a recurring joke that Cam never gets Mr. Fanshaw’s name right. When he must talk directly to him, he just says “Mr. Fan—uh, sir.” Otherwise he is Mr. Fantail, Mr. Fanboy, just about anything except Fantastic.

Like many of Korman’s stories, the chapters in both books here are told from different points of view. In Slacker each of the Awesome Threesome has some chapters. So do Mr. Fanshaw, Daphne, the String, the Friends of Fuzzy president, the middle school principal, and so on. A recurring question from many of them is simply—who is Cameron Boxer anyhow?

We can pretty much guarantee that you will laugh. The only question is how loud?

Notorious is different. It is fun, but not necessarily funny. Yes, Gordon Korman wrote it, and it contains some humorous parts, but is more like The Masterminds or The Hypnotists stories. It is still a young adult novel, but a drama rather than a sitcom.

Keenan Cardinal is recovering from tuberculosis which he contracted in China. At least that is when the symptoms appeared, but he may have picked up the germs in Lesotho or some other country. His mother and stepfather teach at a different international school every year.

But Keenan is no longer in Shanghai. He now lives with his father on Centerlight Island—an island on the St. Clair River north of Detroit, half in Michigan and half in Ontario. His father’s house is on the American side.

At first all Keenan can do is lie in the summer sunlight in his father’s yard. A girl his age who lives on the Canadian side named Zarabeth introduces herself one day, and they become friends—at least until school starts.

Most of the families with children live on the American side. Keenan makes friends with some of the kids in his school while Zarabeth, ZeeBee for short, has to take the ferry to school in Canada and is pretty much gone during the week. She gets upset (maybe jealous?) that Keenan is hanging out with guys who she mostly thinks are jerks, and not without reason.

Some of the kids on the island think ZeeBee is a little weird. Back in the Roaring Twenties Centerlight (Canadians spell it Centrelight) was a major stop for rum runners. Arnold Rothstein had a home here. Al capone used to visit. So did Eliot Ness. ZeeBee seems to obsess over the gangster stories because she lives in a house once owned by Machine Gun Ferguson. Rumor has it that Ferguson hid a stash of money or gold somewhere on the island.

Also, nearly everyone hated ZeeBee’s two-hundred-pound dog, part Great Dane, part Doberman, part Newfoundland, and who knows what else. A lot of the funny or wild stuff in the book relates to the almost incredible damage Barney the dog has done around the island. He is the twenty-first-century one-dog mob on Centerlight. We note that, judging from the Swindle stories, that Korman likes big dogs. Even though Slacker features no dogs, its protagonist is named Boxer.

Now Barney died before Keenan arrived, but ZeeBee suspects that her dog was deliberately done in. In that sense Notorious is like one of those murder mysteries where no one liked the victim. There are plenty of suspects for what ZeeBee calls Barney’s “murder.”

After Barney died, her parents gave ZeeBee a small cocker spaniel she calls Barney Two, but to her nothing can replace Barney One. Barney Two is what Shakespeare would call a fawning spaniel, but ZeeBee disdains him. Keenan feels sorry for the pooch.

In her pique, ZeeBee completely cuts herself off from Keenan. He feels bad and cannot understand why she avoids him. Perhaps to get her attention, perhaps just to have something to do on a small island, Keenan decides to investigate Barney’s “murder.” Did it happen? If so, how? And whodunit?

Notorious becomes a clever mystery, and it becomes clear that both Keenan and ZeeBee have gotten in over their heads.

Korman effectively projects what life on such an island is like. I had friends who lived on an island like Centerlight only accessible by ferry from a different state. Korman gets it. And at the same time he tells an entertaining tale.

We note that this is Korman’s latest (dated 2020) and published by a division of Harper. Before 2017 his books were published by Scholastic. So did Korman sign on with Harper or did Harper buy up Scholastic along with all the other companies it has taken over?