"Schmidt (or Carter Jones, the narrator) had me laughing within the first couple of pages. At 7:15 a.m. on the first day of Carter’s sixth grade year, nothing is going right in the Jones household. The doorbell rings. It is raining “like an Australian tropical thunderstorm,” but the man on the doorstep is completely dry because he’s standing “underneath an umbrella as big as a satellite disk.” When Carter finally lets the man in the house, the man tells Carter’s mother that her father-in-law, whom she never met, has died and left an endowment to enable his butler to continue in the service of the family."