Jake Burt. Greetings from Witness Protection. Scholastic, 2017.

We have been reviewing some pretty serious, even heavy, books lately: a few theological works about heady topics like the Book of Job and a couple on the American Civil War. I needed to lighten up a bit. Greetings from Witness Protection did the trick. It is funny but with a page-turning plot. If you like Gordon Korman—our favorite popular young adult (YA) writer—you will like this book.

Nicki Demere is turning thirteen. She is essentially an orphan. Her mother is dead, and her father has been in prison. She writes him, but he does not reply. She lived with her grandmother until she was nine when her grandmother died. Since then she has been in and out of foster homes, otherwise marking time at an orphanage in New York City.

When, once again, she is called to the supervisor’s office to meet a prospective fostering family, she steels herself for disappointment. None of the families have worked out. Why should this be any different?

Well, it is different. It turns out that the man and woman in the office are not a married couple looking to foster or adopt. They are Federal Marshals. They are looking for a child around her age that physically resembles a family they are placing in the Witness Protection Program. The idea is that even if a criminal or criminal organization is looking for the family, they would be less likely to suspect a family with a different number of children in it.

She is shown a picture of a woman. Nicki realizes the woman looks a lot like her. The lady could pass as her older sister. That is why the marshals have picked Nicki. If Nicki is interested, it means a completely new start with a completely new identity. She will no longer be Nicolette Demere from New York, but she will be someone else from somewhere else.

She and her whole new family will have to do things to not stand out. Nicki, for example, will be in seventh grade. Even though she loves to read and gets good grades in most of her classes, she must earn a B-minus in all her subjects. She is to participate in one sport, but not stand out in it. She must have one other extracurricular activity, but not one that has any kind of interscholastic competitions or special awards. She and her family are to blend in. And no photographs or social media postings.

After a week of training in Georgia, she meets her family. She does not know their real story or why they are in witness protection. She understands that one of them must have testified in a serious criminal trial. Their made-up backstory is that they have recently moved from Cincinnati to Durham, North Carolina. This is where a lot of the humor comes in. The principal of her new school, for example, attended Xavier, so when he starts talking about Ohio, she has to fake it on her feet.

She, her new parents, and new sixth-grade brother have all come from the North. Some of the slang terms and practices in the South are new to them. The neighbors have a “pig-picking” picnic for them a few days after they move in so that they can meet everyone in the neighborhood. At one point a neighbor says her brother is “showing his butt” online. As a Yankee, I could guess what pig picking was, but I had no idea what it meant to show one’s butt.

Nicki, now called Charlotte, makes friends with Britney. “Brit” did fine until sixth grade when she suddenly became a social outcast. Welcome to middle school! She is convinced no one can like her. At the same time she has become a whiz at an online role-playing game. In other words, she is a nerd. To Brit’s mother, online gaming is a community activity, a modern quilting bee.

To give an idea of how “ordinary” her family is supposed to look, at first the marshals tell them not to put up any Christmas decorations when Christmas season arrives. Except that they are the only family with no decorations—which makes them stand out. So the marshals look at satellite photos of the neighborhood from previous years. They figure out the average number of lights, decorations, and yard displays the houses have. They are to have so many strings of lights, so many decorations, one wreath on the door, not too religious, not too garish; in other words, a B-minus in Christmas decorations. Anything not to stand out.

Now Nicki/Charlotte has one particular skill. Her grandmother also had had a criminal career in her day. She had taught Nicki how to pick pockets. Her grandmother would praise her when she came back from a mall visit with money and jewelry she had purloined. When Nicki flew to Georgia, for example, she had never been in an airport. What a place for picking pockets! She saw all kinds of potential.

That skill provides humor as she outwits people in a number of situations. When she first meets the marshals, she starts rattling off facts about Eric, the male marshal—where he lived, that he has a son, and a few other details. How did she know those things? She had lifted his wallet and read his drivers’ license and marshal ID, and she saw a family picture.

Later when she and Brit encounter the class “mean girls” in the nearby shopping mall, she has fun with their purses and ultimately keeps them girls from teasing Brit. While in neither of those cases does she actually steal anything, she does have some difficulty with kleptomania. She steals things not because she needs them or sells them, but just because she can and she likes to. Her skill at theft was one thing she used to be complimented about.

While nearly all the book is written from Nicki/Charlotte’s point of view, there are some pages, usually a single page, between chapters that document other things that are going on. We begin to see the reason her new family is in witness protection. One of them testified against a major New York crime family. When Nicki hears the name, she realizes how serious their situation is.

Of course, in our day and age it is almost impossible to stay hidden. Sooner or later their past will catch up with them. Yes, there is a lot of humor, but like of some Korman’s books, the main plot is deadly serious.

I had a friend who was an admissions officer at an Ivy League college. He said that as soon as the admissions letters were sent out in April, the head of the admissions department would take a week’s vacation. He told no one where he was going. A week later when he returned to the school, a lot of the people who were upset about the decisions had cooled down and had taken steps to move on.

One year, a leader of an organized criminal network was trying to get his son admitted to the school. Like the vast majority of applicants, the son was turned down. The father tried calling the admissions office only to be told that the admissions director was out of town, and no, they did not know where he was. Anyway, at an airport over 800 miles from the school where the director of admissions was changing planes, a representative of the criminal family accosted him to ask why his boss’s son had been turned down. Such enterprises can be well connected.

To say much more would amount to spoiling things. I will drop one hint, though. Readers may have heard of the term Chekhov’s Gun, or Chekhov’s Rifle. The great Russian author and playwright Anton Chekhov once wrote, “One must never place a loaded rifle on the stage if it isn’t going to go off.” There is a very clever use of Chekhov’s Gun in the story. I say no more. Greetings from Witness Protection is Jake Burt’s first book, If he can keep this up, we may have another Gordon Korman waiting in the wings. Enjoy!