Old School

A hilarious and heartfelt intergenerational story, Old School by Gordon Korman is a new favourite.

Dexter lives with his grandma at The Pines retirement community. It’s really all he has known since his parents live overseas. When the school board finally realizes he should be in school, the truant officer sends him off to Wolf’s Eye Middle School where he gets more than a book education.

Believe it or not, Old School is the first Gordon Korman novel that we have read and it has inspired us to go back through his catalogue. This story had a little bit of everything that kept it fast paced and extremely interesting. I loved how the story was shared through multiple perspectives. Dexter, obviously, but also the other students at the middle school, some friends, some foe, as well as some of the adults. These multiple perspectives offer readers so many different lenses to interpret the story. I love how Gordon Korman chose to share the thoughts of all of the different factions of middle school.

I appreciated the growth shown by all of the characters in the story. I read this one aloud to The Bee and some nights we would be talking about how much we disliked Ronnie, other nights talking about how much we loved him. Each character learned so much and changed over the course of the story just as all middle grade readers will. It’s a huge age of growth and discovery so having that reflected back through story is incredibly important.

I appreciated how the old and the new came together. Dexter is an old soul and so many of the things he did in the story, while outrageous and really could never happen in real life, offer readers inspiration to perhaps start looking at how things work and how things can be fixed. It’s an alternate perspective to the immediacy and disposability that is seen in society now.

Overall, Old School is a book that I would highly recommend. The compelling story line, the humour and the conflict all came together perfectly.