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Gordon Korman's The Fort is a friendship story for 10 year olds about five boys who find a bomb shelter under the woods, and the secrets they carry down into it.
Hurricane Leo has just torn through town, and Evan's been landed with Ricky. Ricky is new, has been bumped up a year from his old school for gifted kids, and hasn't made a single friend. Evan's grandma says he's coming along.
Evan's friends are not pleased. They'd just built a secret fort in the woods (mostly old shower curtains and a NO TRESPASSING sign), and the storm has blown it clean away.
Then Ricky starts scraping at the mud and finds a metal trapdoor. Underneath is a whole Cold War bomb shelter. It has lights, a kitchen, shelves of forty-year-old tinned food, a record player and a videotape of the rich man who built it.
Who wouldn't want that as a secret den? The boys sign a pact to tell nobody, and very quickly it becomes more than a place to hang out.
The early chapters swap between the boys, each telling it his own way. Mitchell counts trees and can't stand the number thirteen. Jason's voice is so loud it rattles the metal walls. C.J. keeps doing what he calls death-defiers on his bike. It's properly funny, and you slowly notice what each of them is carrying.
That's the part to know about before you hand it over, because there's heavy stuff under the jokes. Evan and his brother live with their grandparents after their parents went into rehab and never came home. Jason's parents are halfway through a bitter divorce, with him stuck between them. And C.J. crashes his bike on purpose to explain away a bruise, while his stepfather's temper is left for you to work out.
It's handled with real care, and it's all there in the early chapters. The boys are in eighth grade, too, so they're older than most readers on this shelf.
If your reader likes friendship stories with some weight to them, where the laughs and the worries sit side by side, this is a very good one. For a more sensitive child, it might be one to read alongside them.
If Gordon Korman's voice goes down well, try Slacker. It opens with a boy so deep in a video game that he doesn't notice the fire brigade breaking down his front door.
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