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3.4 AVERAGE
3.4 AVERAGE
For a long time I was plagued with the memory of a book I'd read in elementary school about a group of kids that devises a "borrowing" game with disastrous consequences; I could remember all these little details but couldn't for the LIFE of me remember the title or author, and I couldn't find any information about it online, nor could anyone I described it to identify the book for me. Enter a friend in library school who plugged my description into a fancypants librarian search engine and came back with the title, which I proceeded to order from half.com. It's exactly as I remembered it: a group of kids counters summertime boredom by inventing a game where one team steals an item and the other team has to return it before the adults figure out what's going on. It starts out simply enough but quickly turns into a high-stakes game, with one team stealing a car and the other team stealing an elderly neighbor's beloved dog. Of course, the kids ultimately learn a big lesson. It's not a bad little story, but not a particularly good one either, and I have no idea why its storyline stayed with me so long.