Gordon Korman. Linked. Scholastic, 2021.

Gordon Korman continues to be one of our favorite YA (young adult) authors. Linked is definitely more serious than many of Korman’s stories, but it still has enough of his light touch. Indeed, one of the his strengths is how most of his writing is directed to and about middle schoolers. Students in middle school should be able to laugh at themselves, but at the same time understand that their enthusiasm has something to offer others.

The title of Linked refers both to its main character, Lincoln “Link” Rowley, and a massive paper chain project that the middle schoolers of Chokecherry, Colorado, create.

As with many YA stories, Linked is told from multiple points of view. In this case, all but one are students at the middle school. The one exception is ReelTok, a YouTube “influencer” who scours the nation looking for sensational and controversial news.

Chokecherry is a small town in the Colorado foothills. It is remote enough that the county seat is nearly a hundred miles away. Everyone knows everyone else. A few years ago some paleontologists from a prestigious Eastern university discovered some dinosaur fossils. A handful of new families moved in. The locals have named them university eggheads. The kids at the middle school call the two students from egghead families the egglets.

Link and his buddies are pranksters. Link is also a star athlete. The original dinosaur finding was not a bone, though some were located afterwards, but coprolites, fossilized dung. Middle schoolers all over the world are fascinated with poop, so Link and his friends devise a prank involving the eggheads and manure. Such stuff is vintage Korman.

However, the story takes a serious turn as one morning student Michael Amoroso discovers a large swastika painted on the ceiling in one of the hallways. People are shocked, and everyone in the school has to endure a three week tolerance training. No one has a clue who did it.

And then swastikas start popping up at other places around the school. Some old timers in town recall a 1978 incident involving the Ku Klux Klan (KKK). One night a large number of crosses were lit on fire around the town. It was long ago enough that few people remember it or want to admit that it happened in their otherwise peaceful small town. Some folks say it never happened.

The swastikas get some attention from local news outlets, and pretty soon ReelTok, the screen name of that YouTube celebrity has set up camp in town, making things to sound even more sensational than they already are. Is Chokecherry, Colorado, really a hotbed of racists? Korman understandably notes that so many journalists these days come with preconceived notions and try to put words into people’s mouths or otherwise lose any pretense of objectivity. That becomes true not just for YouTubers but traditional newspaper writers.

Some people suspect Michael as the swastika maker because he is president of the art club and was the first to see it. Yet Michael himself is one of the minority students at the school. His family is Afro-Caribbean.

Link is mostly annoyed. His father’s punishment for the manure prank is pretty severe: He cannot play soccer this fall for the school team, and Link is one of the best players. Mr. Rowley is head of the local Chamber of Commerce. He is delighted about the dinosaur find and thinks it might be possible to turn Chokecherry into some kind of dinosaur-themed tourist attraction. Anything that makes Chokecherry look bad enrages Link’s father.

Michael and Caroline McNutt, the student council seventh grade president, come up with a plan to overcome the school and town’s reputation. They had heard of a school in Tennessee that in 1999 collected six million paper clips to represent the six million Jews killed in the Nazi Holocaust. (N.B.: That really happened.) Why not a make a construction paper chain of six million links? Students begin this, it gets more publicity, and soon people and schools from all over the world are sending paper chains to contribute.

One of the families from the college working on the dig is Jewish. Dana Levinson, their daughter, is also a seventh grader at the middle school. She is suddenly getting more attention. People feel sorry for her, and mostly do not really know what to say to her. How is she getting along?

There is one more significant plot element which I am reluctant to share because it could be considered a spoiler. Let us just say that we discover that the Levinsons are not the only people in town with a Jewish background.

I had a friend years ago who had been adopted. When she was in her thirties she sought out her birth family. It turned out that her birth family was Jewish, though her adopted family was Christian. The priest in her church was also Jewish; he had converted to Christianity. He said, “Only God knows who the real Jews are.” Perhaps that is a theme of this story as well.

Linked tells the story very effectively. I confess, I got a little misty a couple of times while reading it—something that does not usually happen to me. It is a delightful tale on tolerance. We sometimes need to be reminded of what Harper Lee’s Scout said: “Folks is folks.”