51 pages • 1 hour read
Andrew ClementsLunch Money
Fiction | Novel | Middle Grade | Published in 2005A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 1-4Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 1 Summary: “Talent”
Greg Kenton is very talented: He is good at sports, schoolwork, singing, playing piano, and drawing. His biggest talent, however, is making money: He is a natural at it.
At age four, noticing that his sloppy brothers Ross and Edward hate cleaning their rooms to get their allowances, Greg offers to do the cleanup for a small fee: roughly two dollars a week for the both of them. His mom finally insists the brothers do the cleaning, but in two years Greg has $200.
He also takes out and sorts the trash and is allowed to keep can-and-bottle deposit refunds, amounting to four dollars a month in winter and eight dollars a month in summer. At ages seven and eight, he makes spare change by polishing his parents’s shoes, cleaning heel marks from kitchen floor tiles, weeding, debugging shrubs, and so on.
He loves sorting and staring at the cash and studying it under a magnifying glass, and he becomes a coin collector. Now and then, he spends money on things he loves, like a big flashlight or baseball cards. By third grade, he has decided his goal is to be rich. Other kids want to get rich, too, but Greg is already doing something about it. He rakes leaves, washes cars, walks dogs, sells lemonade, cleans garages, and shovels show—one winter, he earns $880 shoveling snow. He collects throwaways and holds garage sales.
If his folks need cash for the movies, he lends it to them interest-free, but Ross and Edward must pay a 50-cent fee to borrow. They make fun of him, but they know where to turn for a loan.
One day, Greg’s dad finds a handful of five-dollar-bills that Greg has stashed inside a reference book. He suggests that the boy open a bank account, where unused cash is safe and earns interest. That Saturday, Greg deposits $3,200 at the bank; it is most of his money, though he holds back a few hundred for any sudden expenses.
At age 11, Greg makes “the greatest financial discovery of his young life” (13).
Chapter 2 Summary: “Quarters”
One school day, Greg forgets his bag lunch. He has $1.50 and asks his classmates to borrow two quarters to have enough for a cafeteria lunch. Most of the other kids offer him the change. At lunch, he notices that everyone uses quarters to buy and trade things. If 400 students each have a quarter, that amounts to 100 dollars a day and 500 dollars a week. He decides that “school would be an excellent place to make his fortune” (17).
Chapter 3 Summary: “The Perfect Hammer”
At first, Greg sells gum to students at three sticks for a quarter. Gum, however, can get him in trouble at school. He searches online for toys to sell and finds little troll dolls: “tiny plastic creatures with big eyes and long, bright hair—blue, red, orange, and green” (20). Greg convinces his mom to use her credit card to order 144 dolls for $12 including shipping—he pays her up front in cash—and within three days, he has sold all of them at a quarter each and pocketed $36, including $24 in profit, which he calls “new money.”
His mom worries that Greg has become obsessed with cash, but his dad says Greg still enjoys sports, reading, drawing, and schoolwork, and he works hard for his earnings.
Greg uses his new money to buy more toys online—trolls, superballs, jacks, rubber spiders, and rings—but these do not sell as well, and he has a third left over after two weeks. Greg gets sent to the principal’s office, where Principal Davenport interrogates him about selling the toys. She admires his initiative but says some of the toys have caused problems, especially the balls and sticky spiders, and he is no longer allowed to sell toys at school.
Greg knows that toys are risky sales items because kids will use them at school. Besides, they quickly tire of buying them. The principal didn’t say he couldn’t sell something else, however. As summer begins, Greg ponders what else he can sell that won’t annoy the school staff.
Chapter 4 Summary: “Units”
Greg’s dad owns a large and expensive comic-book collection, and Greg has been a comic fan since he was little. Years earlier, he studied books on drawing and bought “india ink, dip pens, brushes, and paper” at the local art supply store (29).
That summer, working in the evening after sports and work, Greg begins drawing a comic-book adventure. The stories are fairly easy to write, but the drawings need to be perfect, and that takes a lot of hard work. He reads up on how to produce a comic book and settles on a ten-step process to make a very small minicomic. This includes creating 16 “minipages,” then pasting them onto two “master copy” sheets, with eight minipages on each. The minipages must be placed in a certain order—for example, pages 16, 1, 8, and 9 go at the bottom of one master sheet, with pages 13, 4, 5, and 12 upside-down above them.
Greg then uses his dad’s copier to print the masters onto each side of sheets of blank paper. He folds the printed sheets three times—once to make four sides, twice to make eight, and three to make 16—and the minipages come out in the right order. He staples the booklets carefully between pages 8 and 9, then trims the edges so the pages can turn.
It takes about 40 sheets to learn how to print the minibooks correctly, but Greg finally masters it. The result is a booklet the size of a credit card. Fifty can fit in his pencil case.
The minicomic book, Creon: Return of the Hunter, is the first of many that Greg has planned. Volume 1’s eight comics will portray the adventures of a caveman, Creon; the second volume will tell of a future person, Eeon, who is trapped on a dangerous planet; the third will describe a present-day “technodude” Leon, who discovers how to use his atomic wristwatch to travel through time. Leon, Creon, and Eeon then meet up in a final volume. He calls his creations “Chunky Comics.”
By the start of sixth grade in the fall, Greg has 300 copies of Creon’s first adventure ready to sell, and the master copies for the next two adventures ready to copy. Counting paper and refill ink, his costs are two cents per copy, sold for 25 cents: “The money was going to come rolling in” (36).
By noon on day four of his campaign, he has sold 62 copies—he calls them “units”—and, at 25 cents each, he’s made $15.50. He is mildly disappointed: His goal is $25.
At lunch, Greg offers a student, Ted Kendall, a nickel for every two comics Ted can sell. Ted and Greg make a few more sales, then they discover that there is another minicomic on offer. The cover, enhanced with colored pencil, shows a unicorn in the foreground on a sunny day, with a castle in the distance. It is “An Eentsy Beentsy Book” titled The Lost Unicorn (38), and the creator is someone Greg knows and hates: Maura Shaw.
Chapters 1-4 Analysis
The opening chapters describe Greg Kenton, one of the story’s two main protagonists. He is a talented, friendly sixth grader with a knack for making money. The reader gets a sense of how Greg thinks, what he wants—mainly to be rich—and the carefully planned projects he launches to earn cash.
The term “lunch money” occurs only once in the text: During a late-morning class, Greg realizes he left his bag lunch at home, and he does not have enough change for a cafeteria meal. He asks his teacher for 50 cents; she tells the class, “Greg needs some lunch money. Can someone lend him fifty cents?” (15) Most of the students raise their hands. Greg borrows from one of the boys, then realizes that there might be as much as $500 a week in extra quarters all around him in kids’s pockets. He completely misses something obvious: Nearly all the kids are willing to be generous and kind. All he notices is that they all have extra cash.
Greg has the relentless optimism of a born businessperson. When problems erupt or setbacks occur, he reasons out the situation and forms a plan to solve it. He is also fearless, experimenting with different products to sell at school. When some get him into trouble, he immediately abandons them and looks for something else the kids want. He is willing to do the math, estimating his costs and profits.
He also learns quickly: Inspired with the idea of producing small, original comic books to sell to classmates, Greg spends his summer evenings researching how to write, draw, and print comics quickly. Greg is a go-getter.
The printing system Greg uses is called an “octavo,” meaning eight pages (“oct-” for eight) on each side of a printed sheet, which then is folded three times to produce a set of 16 pages. This can be more efficient than trying to print one page at a time. The size of a book produced this way depends on the size of the master sheet: For a hardcover book, an octavo can be four feet wide or more. Greg designs his octavo to fit on a standard letter-size sheet of paper. Printed, stapled, and trimmed, this produces a very small booklet that’s slightly bigger than two by three inches.
Greg is cool-headed most of the time. He does not really focus on his customers, as long as he gets paid for his work. He keeps busy, adapts on the fly, does a good job, collects his pay, gets his schoolwork done, and plays sports. He is focused on the task at hand, but not on the people around him. His older brothers mainly tease him; his parents gently encourage him but wonder if he is too focused on money.
Greg does not care. He loves earning cash. Socially, he is not isolated, but he has qualities of a loner. The reader might get the sense that Greg would be fine all by himself on a desert island, except there woud be no way for him to make money.
Only one problem stands in his way. Little does Greg know that solving that problem will open up new worlds to him. The problem is Maura Shaw.
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By Andrew Clements
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