This week’s reading owes its existence to the Matthew Martin books, which I found in my home library and devoured. The star? Matthew Martin (no prizes for guessing that), who the series follows for four years, through the awkward tween stage. I think I found these books just before I hit those years myself, but readily identified with Matthew and found his computer-geekness especially interesting: thinking about these books takes me back to the days of elementary school, of Apple computers, trays with both 5 3/4 & 3 1/2 floppy diskettes, and tractor-feed printers. (The first print-outs I ever saw came from those dot-matrix printers: my best friend found a web site with Star Trek jokes and Klingon expressions in ’96.). I don’t know why, but I wanted to revisit this series and the week’s theme grew around it.

In Everyone Else’s Parents Said Yes, young Matthew is about to hit the big time. Ten. Double digits. He is beyond excited. With his computer, he has created a bounty of lists — the junk foods his health-conscious mother only allows him once a year, the guest list, the complete itinerary that involves Nintendo tournaments and pestering his older sister Amanda — or, as he likes to call her when she’s bothering him, “runt-chest”. (My favorite line from this book, wholly unnoticed reading as a kid: “Matthew, please don’t refer to your sister as runt-chest. In fact, please don’t refer to your sister’s chest at all.”) Matthew’s occasional — okay, constant — pranks against the girls in class result in them forming a group called G.E.T. H.I.M, which makes him the subject of their collective prankery and culminates in their staging a singalong protest outside his house at his birthday party. The nerve of these junior high broads!

Make Like a Tree and Leave is second in this series, in which the undersized and over-energetic prankster Matthew is dismayed to learn (along with the rest of his class) that one of their elderly neighbors has been badly injured and will have to sell her land to pay hospital bills. The woods she owns are a favorite running-about place of Matthew and his classmates, so the kids decide to start raising funds however they can to help an adult effort to establish a conservancy that will protect the elderly lady’s property. The kids promptly split into girls vs boys teams, but when the two begin sabotaging one another, Matthew acquires a sudden bolt of maturity and argues that The Cause should be more important than fighting. He finds an ally among the girls in Jil!, and all things end happily — except for the child of one of the teachers, who evidently died of polio decades before. That little splash of cold water was not something I noticed reading this as a kid. Also, Matthew inadvertently traps one of his friends in a full-body cast while trying to create an exhibit for their ancient Egypt project.

In Not for a Billion Gazillion Dollars, Matthew is bound and determined to get The Best Computer Program Ever. Reading this as a 30-something techie in 2023 is interesting, because it sounds like a networked version of Adobe Photoshop or something similar. Adjusting for inflation, it would cost $400+ today, so small wonder that his parents refuse to pay. His winninginest smile doesn’t prevail, so Matthew resigns himself to making money himself. After he learns that no, he can’t rent out his sister’s room while she’s at college (air bnb doesn’t exist yet, Matthew, wait a couple of decades), and that no, he shouldn’t wander into traffic offering to wash windows for drivers at red lights, Matthew and his besties (Jil! and Josh) stumble upon a venture that combines their mutual strengths: printing and graphic design! It’s here that The Feelings first begin between Matthew and Jil!, something that will be explored in the next book, but which is obvious to their friends even here — Jil! draws out Matthew’s more thoughtful and mature aspects, and she’s a fun character in her own right. My favorite scene is when Matthew is pestering someone with an invisible pair of scissors, and Jil! forces him to hand over the imaginary scissors, whereupon she places them in an imaginary box, locks it with an imaginary key, and then places said key carefully in her pockets. Their mutual friends can only watch and shake their heads.

Next, in Earth to Matthew, we find Matthew and his class preparing for a weekend field trip to the Franklin Institute, a science museum on steroids, and struggling with Feelings more seriously now. One of his classmates, Jil! (she changed the spelling of her name because Jill was just so boring) and he attended a dance together, and now they’re drifting into becoming a pair. Considering that in the first book Matthew was using his computer to create “GIRLS KEEP OUT” signs, and disappointed and bothered by some of his friends’ disinterest in making their own, that’s quite a sea change — but such things happen with puberty. Both kids are struggling with these feelings and the expectations that follow them: are they supposed to be A Couple now? What does that mean when you’re eleven? Their confusion leads to fighting, but by the end they’ve found a place where they can co-exist.

I thoroughly enjoyed going back to this series, and will be holding on to the used copies I found on ebay so I can jump back into the mid-nineties, a time for me that is unique and special and wonderful because it was when I was growing up. I noticed some weaknesses in the writing (a penchant for showing and not telling ) that I wouldn’t have seen as kids, and suspect that this series contributed heavily to my love of puns, considering that wordplay is one of Matthew’s favorite ways to annoy his family, friends, and archenemy Vanessa. (Which is odd, considering that he’s also a terrible speller — but all of his puns are audible ones.) Reading as an adult, I noticed a few little jokes Danzinger included for parents who might have been reading these out loud, and appreciated the moral elements in every story. These tend to be a little obvious, like when the class does an environmental project, or Matthew’s dad tells him about his young-man problems with credit card deb, but there are more subtle ones as well.