The Grounding of Group 6 is a work of young adult fiction by Julian F. Thompson, author of nineteen young adult novels. The hardcover edition of the popular Avon paperback was published in 1997 by Henry Holt & Co. A Hollywood movie is currently in the works.

Hailed as a groundbreaking classic, the book caused some controversy in 1983 because of its darkly comedic, surreal premise and its slightly explicit sexual content, which was then considered taboo for that genre.

It received rave reviews from adult critics around the globe and was among the "five most popular library titles in the U.S. with the number of circulations from October 1984 through January 1985."

The author has said that he never realized the book was "Young Adult" (a label he does not much like), until his agent told him that it was.

In the story, five teens whose wealthy parents see them as embarrassments or worse are sent to an exclusive
picturesque boarding school in Vermont . . . to be killed. But like its misfit teen characters, The Grounding of
Group 6' defies being categorized. The American Library Association's Young Adult branch (YALSA) recommends it to young readers as an "Adventure," along with just 7 other prized Adventure titles.

Nancy C. Hammond, writing in the Horn Book in 1983, called it a “Satiric Thriller” . Other prominent reviewers have deemed Thompson’s novel a farce, psychological thriller

Psychological thriller

Psychological thriller is a specific sub-genre of the broad ranged thriller with heavy focus on characters. However, it often incorporates elements from the mystery and drama genre, along with the typical traits of the thriller genre...

, a comedy, and a suspense yarn. “Humorously
Anti-establishment

Anti-establishment

An anti-establishment view or belief is one which stands in opposition to the conventional social, political, and economic principles of a society. The term was first used in the modern sense in 1958, by the British magazine New Statesman to refer to its political and social agenda...

” is how Hammond characterized the novel’s main theme

Theme (literature)

A theme is a broad, message, or moral of a story. The message may be about life, society, or human nature. Themes often explore timeless and universal ideas and are almost always implied rather than stated explicitly. Along with plot, character,...

.

Plot

Doctor Simms, the headmaster of the Coldbrook Country School - to which the five wayward youths, all sixteen years old, have been dispatched – succinctly lays out the “plot” to Nat Rittenhouse, the school’s hired assassin:

"We take them off their hands, those lemons. Once and for all. Quick and neat and clean and utterly untraceable. We have those limestone faults quite near the school-these fissures on the surface of the planet. Some of them seem almost bottomless. Drop a lemon into one....we never hear it hit. We call that 'grounding', Mr. Rittenhouse. A natural and wholesome term, I hope you will agree. At Coldbrook, we are definitely....organic."

But the twenty-two year old Nat, who agreed to take on the poisoning of the kids so he could pay off a gambling
debt he owed to gangsters, bonds with the members of Group 6. He sees nothing much wrong with the kids, and soon
becomes really fond of them. These are the five in Group 6:

• Lean and lanky, bitter Coke, who has trouble keeping his shirttails in, has packed cigarettes and white rum in his backpack.
• The more naïve, much shorter Sully hates his life in New York City and his mother’s dreadful “manfriend”.
• Potty-mouthed and funny, Marigold is wise as well as cynical. She slept with one of her mother’s boyfriends.
• Athletic, organized, popular Sarah is an over-achiever who was driven to cheat on an English paper.
• And Ludi, who can see things and hear sounds that are not “there”, has ways and attitudes that just enrage her father.

At first, Nat does not have the heart to let the kids in on the truth, but he finally breaks the news after they have pieced some clues together on their own. Nat also tells them that because he has not killed them he’s on the school’s hit list, too. From that point on, Nat and Group 6 are a team, living mostly in a cabin he built in the woods, a few miles from the school.

Even as the kids begin to master survival skills, a hunt begins. Because it was the gangsters who provided Nat to the school, they are shamed by his failure to do the killing, so they send an employee to kill him. And two outrageous middle-aged members of the school’s faculty, a man and a woman, who are both crack shots, take their rifles into the woods, looking for Nat and the kids. Eventually, the headmaster recruits the entire student body to join in the search, because one of those odd faculty members has mysteriously “vanished”. With most of the school’s population combing the woods, the kids dare to enter the school to search for proofs of their parents’ dreadful (and criminal) “deal”. The climax of the book is there for you to read. Suffice it to say that in the course of their time together the kids make peace with the loss of their old families and gain an unbreakable appreciation of their new one.

English Journal

English Journal

English Journal is the official publication of the Secondary Education section of the American National Council of Teachers of English...

 reviewer, Dick Abrahamson noted that it is the Plot and characters that drive the story and hold the reader's interest: "It is the plot that keeps the reader turning the pages of this book. Characterization is handled by having the individual teenagers react to each other. The reader watches the teenagers deal with the horror of finding out that their parents have paid to have them killed. We also watch as the individuals of Group 6 develop a sense of responsibility and a love for each other."

Norma Fox Mazer

Norma Fox Mazer

Norma Fox Mazer was an American author and teacher, best known for her books for children and young adults. Her novels featured credible young characters confronting difficult situations such as family separation and death....

, a YA author, said that "The author has taken a grotesque subject and made of it a story not only scary, but, praise be, funny. Reading the book, I laughed as often as I shivered and turned pages as fast as possible to find out that most basic and important of all things - what is going to happen."

Major Themes

Nancy Hammond is probably quite correct when she maintains that “humorously anti-establishment” describes this book’s main theme. Indeed, there are two “establishments” that Thompson has fun with: home and school. And therefore each one’s authority figures, parents and teachers.

In The Grounding of Group 6, the parent-adolescent conflict is, to say the least, extreme. Although it’s generally accepted that parents want the best for their children, they certainly do not in this story - unless one’s an advocate for “teenicide”.

The various mothers and fathers Thompson gives us do not just want their kids out of the house, they want them dead and buried. Fathers fare a little worse than mothers: Coke’s and Sara’s and Ludi’s regard their kids as disgraceful in the first two cases and impossible in the third. Sully’s and Marigold’s moms prefer their own pleasure to their children’s company.

But clearly, the author is not wanting readers to take the adults too seriously. They are all overdrawn, over-the-top and (therefore) comic figures. Unbelievable? Almost, but not quite. Almost every reader will know a parent who almost resembles one of them.

Margery Fisher

Margery Fisher

Margery Lilian Edith Fisher 1913–1992 was a British literary critic.She was internationally renowned for her influence in promoting the importance of good literature for children. This came about through her books, world lecture tours and her own notable journal Growing Point...

's Growing Point' , has maintained the novel is a satirical metaphor on the sometimes abused authority that adults wield over children. In this extreme case, from behind rifle scopes.

Reviews

Popular teen advocacy publications gave it glowing reviews, calling Group 6 a stunning literary success, a must summer read, and the debut of an author who would become highly regarded, world-wide, as an important youth advocate, according to the "Voice of Youth Advocate's" (VOYA) Editorial Advisory Board President, Pamela Spencer Holley and others.

Zena Sutherland in the Bulletin of the Center for Children's Books, states that Thompson's writing "sparkles with intellectual sophistication...is imbued with a persuasive warmth."

One of Julian Thompson’s writing goals, as stated in an interview with Something About the Author (SATA), was to help kids see that some of the limitations imposed on them hurt rather than helped, and that a lot of the answers adults gave should not be swallowed whole.

In the book, Thompson makes that point comically in a conversation between Nat and Ludi after Nat says, “We used to call our high school a jail.”
On the morning of August 17, 1983, Bill Dwyer made The Grounding of Group 6 and it's excellent reception the sole subject of his popular, syndicated, half-page column, "Bill Dwyer's World." Dwyer approvingly quoted famed writer, Robert Cormier's

Robert Cormier

Robert Edmund Cormier was an American author, columnist and reporter, known for his deeply pessimistic, downbeat literature. His most popular works include I Am the Cheese, After the First Death, We All Fall Down and The Chocolate War, all of which have won awards. The Chocolate War was challenged...

 description of "The Grounding" as:

"An extraordinary novel, by turns harrowing and hilarious, almost relentless in its suspense and, finally, quite moving."

By then, reviewers in The Washington Post, Publishers Weekly, as well as dozens of other respected critics had already weighed in, heaping unusual, even hyperbolic praise on The Grounding of Group 6 and Julian F. Thompson. Some excerpts:

Harry Mazer - "It's a mad farce, a romp, a Marx Brothers

Marx Brothers

The Marx Brothers were an American family comedy act, originally from New York City, that enjoyed success in Vaudeville, Broadway, and motion pictures from the early 1900s to around 1950...

 comedy with Mel Brooks

Mel Brooks

Mel Brooks is an American film director, screenwriter, composer, lyricist, comedian, actor and producer. He is best known as a creator of broad film farces and comic parodies. He began his career as a stand-up comic and as a writer for the early TV variety show Your Show of Shows...

 and Woody Allen

Woody Allen

Woody Allen is an American screenwriter, director, actor, comedian, jazz musician, author, and playwright. Allen's films draw heavily on literature, sexuality, philosophy, psychology, Jewish identity, and the history of cinema...

thrown in. It made me laugh out loud."

Norma Klein - "A compelling, fascinating and original novel. Julian Thompson is a real find."

Publisher's Weekly - "Thompson's story reaches a tremendous pitch of suspense and ends in a smashing surprise. Everyone will be looking for more feats from this author."

The Washington Post - "A chilling, disturbing, yet often funny paperback original."

The Philadelphia Inquirer - "...chilling and wonderfully scary. The five teenagers are extremely likable...their conversation and reflections never seem anything but completely natural. Thompson never falters as a good craftsman."

Thompson continued to produce well-reviewed YAs and win literary awards. Articles about this now classic work continued to appear. These later analyses of the book were no less enthusiastic than the original reviews.

Unsurprisingly, the hardcover release gave birth to a whole new generation of fans. Girl's Life was among the, then, top teen magazines that picked up on Group 6.

Meaning of Title

Growing Point Journal, which described The Grounding of Group 6 as an "extended metaphor, an implied statement about the power teachers possess over their pupils and parents over their young," had this to say about the novel's title: "...Group 6 is different and so is the grounding whose grim second meaning suggested in the punning title gradually emerges in the narrative."

Growing Point added: "A startling tale but convincing because of firm detail and sharp characterising (sic, U.K. spelling) of the boys and girls who forge an extraordinary group-relationship out of anger and resolve." The humorous twist on the common adage of being "grounded for life" in the author's clever title was also noted.

Motion picture

In 2007, Lizzie Skurnik exclaimed on her popular teen book blog, Jezebel.com that she, "Can't believe this book hasn't been made into a movie!" Many other book reviewers and fans have concluded that The Grounding of Group 6 has the all the makings of a Hollywood hit. In Writers on writing for young adults, Patricia E. Feehan, said she gets more mail on "Group 6," than any other, including an appeal from a young girl in Virginia who wants the movie to be made so she can play Marigold.

Late last year, it was reported that Tom Sheppard optioned the motion picture and TV rights to The Grounding of Group Six, which he has adapted into a screenplay and is directing. Sheppard has won three Emmy Awards for writing Steven Spielberg's Pinky and the Brain, and Nickelodeon's Back at the Barnyard. The film, currently in development, is being produced by Jeff Apple, producer of the Academy Award nominated In the Line of Fire, starring Clint Eastwood, and The Recruit, with Al Pacino. Thompson plans to have an e-book and new paperback edition published later this year.