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Hello Gordon,

Just wanted to share this review that my daughter wrote about Losing Joe’s Place.  She had us all read Losing Joe’s Place quite a while ago and she is a writer and has a blog and newsletter.  I wanted to share this review she wrote because this book is still very important to her.  Her name is Ainsley MacIntyre and her newsletter is called The Evening Coat.

Thank you,

Liz

I don’t have a favorite book so much as I have five hundred favorites, though on a particularly focused day I might be able to narrow that down to a top fifty, perhaps even a top ten– subject to constant change and fluctuation, naturally, depending on my mood or the weather or the time of day. One constant between all of these lists is that Gordon Korman is always represented on them somehow, and I assume this will be true until the day that I die. 

In addition to being a genuine Canadian treasure, Gordon Korman is largely responsible for shaping my love of stories and the way they are told. I can’t even remember the first time I picked up a Bruno & Boots book, or which road trip it was exactly that I devoured all of Our Man Weston during, anymore than I can remember, like, my first gulp of oxygen, because that is how essential his writing felt to me during my childhood. The singular ability he has of elegantly conducting the traffic of a dozen different plotlines, weaving them in and around each other until the exact moment he chooses to let them all gloriously collide, this impressed me as a young reader. As an adult now and (allegedly) a writer myself, it is still astounding. 

I won’t die on the hill that the YA novel Losing Joe’s Place is necessarily the best of his work, but it is the story I have the most affection for. The concept is simple: three sixteen year old boys are living on their own in Toronto for a summer with only one warning (“do not get kicked out”) to guide them. These instructions soon prove trickier to follow however, as Jason, Ferguson, and Don discover that their landlord is as foul-tempered as he is sarcastic and manipulative, and as such he is unlikely to be sympathetic to their woes, which include: unemployment, love triangles, and one unexpected house guest with plenty of hobbies, chief of which is wrecking havoc. The characters are often absurd, the storyline frequently turns farcical, and the entire reading experience remains as rollicking as it was whenever I first read it approximately one million years ago.    

Maria Popova of Brainpickings once said that she tries to return to her favorite children’s books once a year “for basic soul maintenance.” While I don’t re-read Losing Joe’s Place or my other beloved Korman books anywhere close to that often, I am charmed by the sentiment that the books you loved as a child must be treated tenderly, because they can give you a deeper understanding of who you are today. And that no matter how many dozens or hundreds of books you read and love afterwards, there is at least one small part of you that will always stay the same.