Lunch Money

The story swirls around Greg Kenton, one of the book’s two main protagonists. A budding businessperson at age four, Greg has a knack for making money. Besides doing odd jobs around the neighborhood and selling small items at school, he is good at his studies, sports, music, writing, and drawing. He combines some of these talents to produce a series of comic booklets that he sells for a quarter each. Greg is borderline-obsessed with making money, though at first his obsession is fairly harmless. Then his ambitions expand, the principal objects to his sales at school, and Maura Shaw shows up with a competing comic book.

Greg must learn how to cooperate with those who can block his business activity, and at the same time find ways to work with Maura without getting into shouting matches with her. Greg has two major insights that improve his situation. First, he realizes that Maura greatly values his contributions to her comic-book project, and that she can and wants to contribute to his work as well. Second, he sees that his approach to sales at school does not always consider other people’s needs and feelings. Like the corporations that sell goods to students, “he’d been thinking of the kids at school that same way, as targets” (210).