First, Happy Birthday to the great sovereign nation of Canada, home of my birth, and the place I spent the first 35 years of my life. It may not be perfect but it will always be home.
Second, in response to some questions from regular readers of this website along with my promise to post some non-Celluloid Heroes related updates to BradAbraham.com, I give you this Very Special Canada Day Edition. Now, were this day July 1, 1984 instead of July 1, 2025 and you were to ask eleven year-old me who my favorite author was, I (and I’m sure many kids like me who grew up within the Scarborough District Schools System) would have answered: Gordon Korman
I discovered Korman, specifically his popular in Canada “Bruno and Boots” series, chronicling the (mis)adventures of two teenaged boys attending the prestigious Macdonald Hall – an exclusive private boarding school just north of Toronto on Highway 48.
Over four initial books – This Can’t Be Happening at Macdonald Hall! (written by Korman in the 7th grade as a middle-school assignment), Go Jump In The Pool!, Beware The Fish!, and The War With Mr. Wizzle (later re-titled The Wizzle War) – Korman spun wild pre-teen/early-teen tales for a very appreciative audience.
The book series was uproariously funny, endlessly inventive while remaining just enough plausibility to feel real. There were no Big Issues or Deeper Messages to be found within the pages of the Macdonald Hall books; just the simple joy of reading a story intended purely to entertain. And entertain they did.
The other reason we all gravitated towards Korman? He was Canadian, like we were Canadian. He grew up in nearby (nearby being in relation to Scarborough-Agincourt) Thornhill Ontario. Now that may not seem a big deal to you but if you were a young Canadian in the late 70s-early 80s you cannot begin to fathom how groundbreaking it was to have a book series so identifiable and recognizable as Canadian.
Having books where kids just like me were the main players was a huge deal. Having references to Toronto and Winnipeg, the Ontario Place Forum, Algonquin Park and so much more was even bigger; a rare thing in Canadian Kid Lit which at the time seemed tethered to either the Prince Edward Island of the early 20th century or the Prairies of the 1930s.
Korman was a GenX author writing for an audience his own age. Characters who inhabited the same worlds we did. His characters grew with him. They grew with us as well. And his characters were fun to hang around with. So much so I always felt disappointed after reading the books to know deep down that Bruno and Boots, stern headmaster Mr. Sturgeon, Macdonald Hall itself, and the girls from neighboring Miss Scrimmage’s Finishing School For Young Ladies, were all fiction. But there was enough Canadiana in his books they felt a part of you at the same time; a part of your experience growing up Canadian.
It was also a very specific formula that gravitated me towards Korman’s writing; a formula on display from his first Macdonald Hall book. Bruno is the scheming rebel, Boots the more sober-minded pal. It’s clear that Korman wishes he was Bruno but realizes deep down he’s Boots. I certainly wished I was a Bruno and not a Boots.
This is a formula on display through many of his early works; the wild rebel contrasted with the more sensible type, the two of whom nonetheless remain stalwart friends. It is, on reflection, a model that was prevalent in literature and movies and TV for that matter, best embodied by the relationship between two friends from the northern suburbs of Chicago.
I would even go far to say that Korman’s work was hugely influential on mine as a writer. Not so much for the stories he wrote, but for proving to me and everyone who read his books that we could become storytellers ourselves, despite being Canadian small-town and suburban kids. That we all had a story of our own to tell.
As for how I discovered Korman, I have to credit the good-old rite of passage for any school-child in Canada and the US for that matter: The Scholastic Book Fair, where you could either purchase (in a pop-up gymnasium shop) or pre-order (through a flyer you brought home to your parents) the books you wanted at a discount. And I think it was after my 4th Grade teacher Mrs. Murray read the first MacDonald Hall book to the class during storytime (interrupted by frequently uproarious bouts of classroom-wide laughter), that I checked off a special set of the Macdonald Hall books in the Scholastic Flyer. A few short weeks passed until the Big Day when everyone’s books arrived.
I tore through the entire Bruno and Boots series multiple times over. I couldn’t get enough of them. Then as now when I discover something new and exciting (to me at any rate) I really go all-in (see my recent obsessions with vinyl records and movie novelizations for proof). And fortunately Korman’s career as an author was just getting started.
The one-two punch of Who is Bugs Potter? and Bugs Potter Live At Nickaninny followed; chronicling the misadventures of madcap teenaged rock-and-roll drummer Bugs Potter of Winnipeg Manitoba and two very different adventures; one while on an isolated camping-trip with his family in the far north, and the other set in Toronto – specifically the Big Bad Downtown Toronto of Queen Street, Ontario Place, the Royal Ontario Museum, and other environs I myself had visited first-hand.
Next came Our Man Weston – a madcap story of a young would-be detective and his harried brother, as they spend a summer working at an exclusive resort in Northern Ontario that just happens to be harboring a very real coterie of actual spies. No Coins, Please, told the story of a twelve year-old con artist running a number of get rich schemes while he and a group of fellow travelers embark on a cross-country tour through the United States.
But the one I enjoyed the most was I Want To Go Home! best described as The Great Escape set at a summer camp.
In short, Gordon Korman ruled my literary world from 1983-1985. And when we moved to North Carolina his books, read and reread over and over, became a lifeline tethering me to the Canada I missed so much that year. Re-reading a Korman Klassic brought a little bit of Canada back to me. Just seeing familiar names and places in print was enough to give me a feeling of home.
Korman moved to the USA, specifically NYC in the early 80s and has called it home ever since. His books thus shifted from Canadian to American settings, and I have to admit that after Don’t Care High, A Semester In The Life of a Garbage Bag, and Son of Interflux, I tapped out. Partially because of the US-centric setting (the books felt, to me, just like so many other US-based books), but also because of that thing that happens where you just start aging out of Middle-Grade fiction (a term that didn’t even exist back in the 1980s).
By 1986 we had moved back to Canada, and I was soon into Stephen King, not Bruno and Boots. The Korman books went on the downstairs bookshelf, then into a cardboard box. I couldn’t quite part with them, but I wasn’t ready to revisit them. They would stick with me for twenty more years, until 2007 when I gifted my entire collection to the daughter of a family friend who was by then the age I was when I discovered Bruno and Boots..
All my Korman books – save for one.
I kept I Want To Go Home! partially because it was my favorite and because, as always, I wanted to keep a small piece of that era of my childhood with me. Also, frankly, because I always thought this “Great Escape at a Summer Camp” had the makings for a great movie (and I did make some attempts to get an adaptation underway but to no avail).
So .. why this revisiting of a 40+ year-old memory? Well, let’s flash forward to this year, 2025, and to myself now the parent of a child approaching his tenth birthday.
I can’t remember the specific circumstances since they were so mundane but I believe it came from an expression of the perennial whine of the 9 year old: “I’m bored”.
He has always been an avid reader, my son; ever since he was a baby. His first word, after “Mama” and “Dada” was “book”. He accompanied me on my first ever book tour out to California, and has been surrounded by books all his life. My wife and I both read to him constantly and even today he is a voracious reader with literacy skills well beyond his age group’s.
He of course is a fan of the Wimpy Kid and Dog Man and Captain Underpants and Big Nate books, but also was gifted a collection of Judy Blume’s Fudge series which he found uproariously funny and read cover-to-cover multiple times. Like me, when he finds something he likes he really goes all-in. See also his current obsessions with the Jurassic Park movies, Minecraft, and Godzilla..
And so it came to pass on this day of boredom I knew exactly where to go and what to do, pulling that battered, yellowed old copy of I Want To Go Home! off the shelf and handing it to him, telling him it was one of my favorite books when I was his age, and that it was really funny and he should read it. Which he did.
About an hour later the guffaws emanating from his room confirmed he was enjoying himself. And after reading the whole thing over a couple of days he read it again. It has a new home now; on his bookshelf in his bedroom. That dusty old paperback belongs to him now, over hopefully many rereads in years to come.
Our next stop was the local library which thankfully has a good selection of Korman books in the catalog. Scanning the shelves I found the first two Macdonald Hall books, which he borrowed and we both read through, him first then me for a re-read some forty years down the line since first adventuring with Bruno and Boots.
I also found our library has the later Macdonald Hall books – which I haven’t read but you can bet I plan to this summer and am greatly looking forward to catching up with those old friends. And lastly a used-bookstore search unearthed this paperback copy of Our Man Weston, forcing me to ponder the question of whether this deep dive back into Korman’s works was for my son’s benefit or mine.
Korman is still active, still writing, still publishing and very successful at that. I’m told there are even a series of Canadian-produced TV movies based on the Macdonald Hall books that while I have yet to check them out they certainly are on my radar – to a degree. So clear is my mental image of that school and those characters all these years on I’m not sure I want to have those images colored by different interpretations of both. I have my Bruno and Boots and my Macdonald Hall, just as a whole generation of GenX-era Canadians have theirs.
I certainly regret giving those Korman books away now (but at the same time hope my friend’s daughter enjoyed those books and cherished them like I cherished them), seeing how much some of those earlier Canadian books, now long out of print, are fetching in the secondary market; the two Bugs Potter books and No Coins, Please each command upwards of $100 eBay with no plans that I am aware of to reprint them. This is shame as I would love to revisit those as well (and you can be certain I will be scoping out the used bookstores I find my way to over these summer months just in case) but even for me there are limits.*
You cannot underestimate the power of the right book at the right time in your life. Rereading Korman has been like stepping back in time to a more simple era. Yes that sounds cliched but all clichés, like stereotypes, have a nugget of truth to them. The worlds of 1982-1985 and 2022-2025 are very different but at the same time there is a lot that hasn’t changed. Parents try and do their best for their children and those same children will complain that they’re bored. And sometimes an artifact from your childhood can arrive just in time to entertain your son or daughter and remind you that while we all have to grow up its up to us whether we let ourselves truly grow old.
*Of course if Apple Books or Scholastic or even Korman himself have plans to reissue those Canadian classics of Kid-Lit now would definitely be the time to do it.
