Morgan’s Got Game

Morgan is tired of feeling left out at school because everyone else is partnered up inside the library playing Dragon's Gold on their Robogamer Z7s while he is outside being chased (a.k.a. playing soccer tag) by “Aldeen Hummel, the Godzilla of Grade Three”, the only other kid without a Z7. When even Aldeen gets a Z7, Morgan cajoles his parents into getting him one as well, but then he's forced to pair up with mean Curtis all the time because Aldeen won't play with anyone else. Curtis, a nasty player and a bully to boot, starts making fun of Aldeen, claiming that her Z7 must be broken because she won't play with anyone else. Finally, he challenges her to a public game, and Morgan must decide if he wants to help Aldeen and risk being called her boyfriend by Curtis.

Console games and portable games have become part of the landscape of childhood in North America, and Morgan's Got Game shows some unique aspects of school and play culture that developed in response to those items, such as pockets on the classroom wall for your digital gadgets during class time. While these pockets are primarily a means to control the use of the items, they also have become a sort of display of who has got the newest thing and who has not. Morgan feels great pride in having a new Z7 to put in a pocket with his name on it, and he chooses his spot on the wall carefully. The story also reveals how timeless and recognizable the actual phenomena are: the peer pressure and envy, begging one's parents or guardians, “earning” one's new toy, or having it as a hand-me-down from someone else. What is not present in this narrative that would have been in older stories of this type is the hopeful breaking of piggy banks and saving up of pocket money, or earning enough money to buy the thing – because, in the real world, the desired items would easily cost over a hundred dollars, closer to five hundred in the case of gaming consoles, and another seventy to ninety dollars per each new game. This is quite simply reflected in Aldeen's prowess at Dragon's Gold; Morgan mentions offhand that Aldeen is so good at it because she only owns that one game.

Ted Staunton has done an excellent job of observing and presenting these aspects of modern childhood in a very tight, streamlined first-person narrative that uses easy words and moves along at an exciting pace while avoiding pat goody-goody solutions to the kids' problems. When you are in the third grade, being called someone's boyfriend and made fun of as such is as big a problem as not being able to afford the popular new gaming device, and vice versa. Bullies don't repent and magically become your friend. Your plan to do something great might not work out the way you thought. Nonetheless, some things do end up being okay.

Morgan's Got Game is an engrossing read that would appeal to reluctant readers and beginning readers, but it also has enough complexity to hold up to rereads and family discussions. The tone is lively, and Morgan is a likable ordinary character who is a recognizable type while also being convincingly realistic, as are his friend Charlie, frenemy Aldeen and actual enemy Curtis. There are some reader-friendly features, such as the enlarged and bolded texts for emphasis and some very expressive illustrations by Bill Slavin to help with context. The book description on the Internet mentions that this book has dyslexia-friendly features, a wonderful thing for a first chapter book to pay attention to, but I don't have the knowledge to verify.