Swindle

Swindle is a middle-grade novel published in 2008 by Canadian American author Gordon Korman. In the story, 6th-grader Griffin Bing enlists a group of his classmates to retrieve a rare Babe Ruth baseball card from an unscrupulous collector known as Swindle, who has conned Griffin out of the card. The book is the first of eight books, as of 2019, in the popular Swindle series. Nickelodeon made a film of the same name based on the novel in 2013.

Plot Summary

The novel is written in the limited third-person past tense and follows the protagonist, 11-year-old 6th-grader Griffin, for most of the narrative. The story takes place in Griffin’s hometown of Cedarville, New York. Griffin, known to his best friend Ben Slovak as “The Man With The Plan,” convinces Ben to spend the night with him in the old Rockford house, an abandoned house that is slated to be torn down to make way for a local history museum. Griffin sees his act as a form of protest; at the town hall meeting to decide what would be built on the Rockford house lot, Griffin had proposed a skatepark and made a detailed presentation outlining his plan.