The Get Rich Quick Club 

By Dan Gutman
Reviewed by Kenny Brechner

    From the pages of The Get Rich Quick Club, a new release by Dan Gutman from Harper Collins Publisher, comes the following. "But then, in next Thursday’s mail , there it was - The Farmington Journal. Splashed across the front page was our photo and a big headline: UFO SIGHTED IN FARMINGTON?"

    However surprised Farmington residents might be to discover such a headline in their local paper, they should be even more surprised to find a headline announcing that a nationally released children’s book has been set in Farmington, it being the rarer of those two unusual events after all.

    Dan Gutman is a nationally acclaimed children’s author best known for his quality juvenile novels with sports themes, such as They Came From Centerfield, Honus and Me: A Baseball Card Adventure, and The Million Dollar Shot. Apart from these books Gutman also dabbles with non-athletic characters, as in his Qwerty Jones Time Travel books. The Get Rich Quick Club, an entertaining, crisply written summer adventure story revolving around a group of Farmington children who, keenly aware of the lack of money in their collective pockets, bond together to try and change that particular state of affairs, falls into the non-athletic category.

    The narrator, and heroine of our story is eleven year old Gina Tumolo. Gina wastes no time telling us that "Ever since I was a little girl, I have loved money." Reasoning that if King Tut and Bill Gates, acquired vast sums at an early age then, "Why can’t I, Gina Tumolo, accumulate a vast fortune at a very young age? What’s stopping me? Nothing."

    With this in mind Gina founds The Get Rich Quick Club, whose members include her subtle and intelligent friend Rob, an Australian emigrant Quincy, whose language is entertainingly translated with footnotes throughout the book, and the young Bogle twins, raucous and adept at lying. Rob comes up with the idea of producing a fake UFO photo. The kids rally to the idea and, pooling their resources, manage to make a good one.

    Turned down, not unkindly, by a tabloid paper, The National Truth, the kids turn to the savvy, if overworked editor of the Farmington Journal, who buys their photo for fifteen dollars. Fueled by the Bogle twins’ shameless lying, and Gina’s solid business acumen, the kids end up at the center of a media circus, poised to make ten million dollars on advertising contracts and personal appearances, when Rob, uncomfortable with the lie at the heart of their impending fortune, tells the Farmington Journal the truth.

    The Get Rich Quick Club’s primary reason for being is to entertain its young readers, which it does extremely well with its realistic, likeable characters, sharp dialogue, light tone and concise storyline. The moral of the story, that lying is morally questionable, is handled deftly. Gutman allows it to resonate quietly for a while before easing the narrative back into a lighter, more comfortable tone, by throwing in an over the top boy who cried wolf reprisal near the end. Looking back on their summer the kids are left to reflect that what really mattered was that they had "a blast together."

    Now, what well informed readers, readers who know a lot about Farmington because they happen to live here that is, want to know, is how did the book come to be set in Farmington? Does the author have a connection here? Was his entertaining portrayal of the Farmington Journal a deliberate reference to this very paper, The Franklin Journal, where, with enormous irony, Gutman’s book finds itself on the front page?

    The author has in fact never visited Farmington, he did his research online. His decision to set the story here involved Chester Greenwood. Gutman reports that his, "original idea was to have the kids try to make a fortune by capitalizing on the fact that earmuffs were invented in Farmington. I ditched that idea at some point, but kept the story there." As to the Farmington Journal, "I DID know about the local paper. I saw the name when I was looking up Farmington on the Internet. They'll probably get a kick out of this--when I originally wrote the book I used "The Franklin Journal." But my publisher told me to change it because they didn't want to get sued!"

I    nformed area readers, unlike readers from other parts of the country who know less about Farmington, will easily see that a little local knowledge would have made for some nice touches in the book. Why refer to "UFO nuts camping out in the field," when they could have been camping out at the Farmington Fairground, for example. On the other hand, one is inclined to forgive Gutman for his somewhat superficial knowledge of Farmington. Partly because The Get Rich Quick Club is a delightful book. And partly because it is fun to be a little bit famous, under the right circumstances that is.