By Gary Paulsen
A boy gets a beat-up riding mower for his twelfth birthday, mows one lawn out of boredom, and eleven weeks later has fifteen employees, a share in a heavyweight boxer, and 480,000 dollars he can't quite explain.
The narrator turns twelve and gets his grandmother's old riding mower, which is rusty and huge and not really a present. He mows his own lawn because he's bored. A neighbor sees him and pays him to do theirs. Then another neighbor calls. Then the phone won't stop. He has more lawns than there are hours of daylight, which he has no idea how to fix, and that's when Arnold shows up, an aging hippie stockbroker who offers to trade a mowed lawn for stock instead of cash and then starts investing the money the boy is pulling in. Before long the boy owns a piece of an internet startup and a coffin company, has hired fifteen people to keep it all running, and is bankrolling a heavyweight fighter named Joey Pow. Then some men turn up wanting a cut. Every chapter is titled with an economics term, and every chapter earns it.
Eighty-eight pages, and a child comes out the other side understanding supply and demand, labor costs, capital, investment, and risk, because they watched all of it happen to somebody instead of being told any of it. The engine is the narrator's bafflement. He never really grasps what's going on; he just keeps saying yes, things keep multiplying, and the comedy of a twelve-year-old being handed a stock portfolio does the teaching. The chapter titles are economics terms, which sounds like homework and reads like a running joke. If your child won't go near a fat book, this one is short and fast and genuinely funny, and it slips a whole economics lesson in while they're laughing. There's a sequel too, so if it clicks you've got another one waiting.