Kids Making Good: The Grounding of Group Six

My next book for the Shelf Discovery Challenge is The Grounding of Group Six, by Julian F. Thompson. To my confusion, the copyright date was 1997, which makes me much much older than the original Shelf Discovery author, but closer inspection says it was originally published in 1983. I wonder what he changed for the new edition? Anyone know? The clothing makes a lot more sense in the original date.

I also found out that the author's name is Julian, not Julia as I thought for the past quarter century. I had skipped this book thinking it was all about the romance, and I bet a lot of that assumption was based on the author being a girl. Of course, a lot of this book IS about the romance, but a lot is about the hiding from the evil murderers. Five kids and a counselor head off into the wilderness, but will any of them come back? Will anyone not get laid? Because the new school is not all it seems...

I bet I would have enjoyed it a lot back in the day. It was pretty fun now, but I had a more detached perspective, watching the three girls pair up with the three boys (well, two boys and an awfully young "teacher"). It's also fun coming as a parent to the description of the five awful parents who pay for the grounding (permanent, as in in the ground) of their failed children. I suspect I had more sympathy with them now than then. And I had more of a gut issue with the pairing of the twenty-two year old with one of the sixteen year olds, even though he was a very immature guy in a lot of ways. It's good that it's a fast read, because otherwise the basic premise is a bit dodgy -- their decision to hang out lurking in the woods next to the murderers instead of driving away is rather odd. But suspenseful! Will Sully make a move on Sara? Will the sniper shoot her on the way to the cottage? Will they find proof before they get caught? B