By Gordon Korman
A boy who'd rather game than do anything fakes a do-gooding club to get his parents off his back, and then it stops being fake.
Cameron Boxer would happily spend fourteen hours a day gaming and call it a life well lived. Then one marathon session gets so all-consuming that he half-burns down the kitchen, and his parents threaten to pull the plug for good. So he cooks up a cover story: the Positive Action Group, a community-service club that exists entirely on paper, just proof that he's a responsible, well-rounded young man. The trouble is that people actually join. Real projects start happening. A beaver named Elvis gets rescued and adopted as a mascot. Cameron ends up running a genuine do-gooding movement he never wanted and can't seem to shut down, and somewhere in the chaos he starts to figure out that the world past the screen might be worth showing up for.
If you've got a child who'll lock onto a game for hours but calls a book boring after two pages, this is one I'd hand them. Korman writes fast and funny: short chapters, a joke or two a page, and a scheme that keeps snowballing in ways you don't see coming. It reads like Wimpy Kid but with an actual arc, because Cameron slowly, almost against his own will, starts caring about something that isn't a high score. Different characters take turns narrating, so it never stalls. Mostly it's just a book that recognizes the gamer child and teases him without ever making him the butt of the joke.