A Deadly School

The Grounding of Group 6 by Julian F. Thompson
Reviewed by Mara Ravitz


In the book The Grounding of Group 6 by Julian F. Thompson, five children's parents decided to send their kids to boarding school to be killed. These five kids are all good kids, but have all committed a serious offense toward their parents. There are two boys, Coleman "Coke" DeCoursey, Arthur Robey Sullivan "Sully Linus," and three girls, Sara Slayman Winfrey, Marigold, and Louisa "Ludi" Rebecca Locke. The leader of their group, Group 6, is a man named Nat Rittenhouse. Nat decided to become the leader of Group 6 because he made a bet with a man named Arnold Emfatico. Nat owes the state college for two years and not have the money to pay off this debt. Arnold knows that Nat does not have the money to pay, and tells Nat that his uncle needs a man to pick up a "gift" for him. All Nat had to do is fly to Louisiana, take a boat to the middle of a river and fall asleep so that the gift may be put on the boat for Arnold's uncle. He does this, but Arnold's uncle does not recieve the gift that he was expecting and told Nat that he owed him 1000 dollars for plane fare and the charter fee. Arnold then tells Nat that his uncle knows another job that Nat can do to get all of the money that Nat needs to pay off his debt. "Uncle knows a job you can get. He's gotten help for this same guy before. It pays a lot for hardly any work at all; when you get paid, you pay uncle, and the state. What you gotta do is call this number, see? And tell the guy that you can help him ground Group 6"(pg. 61).

Nat calls the number the next day and meets the Doctor at a restraunt in town. The Doctor explains what Nat's job will be, "Sometimes, a person gets a lemon even if the name is Cadillac, or Rolls. And if you do, it doesn't seem to do a bit of good to take it back and ...'Back in the saddle again, back where a friend is a friend..' It simply can't be fixed. No matter how many mechanics you hire you still got a lemon on your hands. The only thing to do is get rid of it. That's your job"(pg. 63). Therefore Nat's job was to kill the five members of Group 6.

Sully, Coke, Sara, Marigold and Ludi are told by their parents that they are being sent to Coldbrook Country Boarding School. The kids are okay with boarding school, and really want to get away from home. All of the kids write letters to Coldbrook Country saying why they think that they should be accepted to the school. Sully, Coke, Sara, Marigold, and Ludi all take the school bus down to their new school, but when they get there the five of them find their counselor, and instead of going to put their stuff away in a dorm, they start walking towords the woods. The kids thought that it was some kind of school orientation; it was their first year at Coldbrook Country, and they didn't know how the school was run. The kids and Nat end up going to a cabin Nat built that he calls Spring Lake Lodge. Little do they know, their adventure at Coldbrook Country Boarding School is just beginning.

One of the things I did not like about the book The Grounding of Group 6 is that the characters are very predictable in a lot of the situations that they get caught in. An example of this would be when Group 6 went into the Doctors office to look for evidence so that they could turn in the Doctor and their parents. Then the Doctor and all of the workers came into the office when Group 6 was in there. "Just as the word 'freeze' fit as naturally in the mouth of Arn-the-Barn Emfatico as Wednesday nights spaghetti dinner, so did the expression 'My, my, what have we have here?' feel exactly right in Doctors"(pg. 259). However The Grounding of Group 6 is a wonderful book that can be very suspensful at times. An example of this would be when Nat went to find out if there was a person in Group 6's hideout. "Thinking all those thoughts made Nat decide he'd ahve to see if there were people in the house, and if there were, how many. Their sex and size would be of interest, too"(pg. 126).

Finally, this book really stresses how horrible and unforgiving parents can be. One of the girls was sent to Coldbrook Country Boarding School because she plagerized part of a paper once. "Sara found she could take parts of Updike's srories and, changing just a word or two (like fuschia to purple), make them quite presentable as her 'free writing.' Mrs. Martin mostly gave them 83, or 86, or sometimes 92..."(pg. 85). She made one pretty serious mistake and her parents sent her away to be killed. I think that that punishment is pretty harsh for plagerizing a story a few times in your life. But, overall I think that The Grounding of Group 6 was a wonderful book.

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