Over on my Goodreads, I try to review and recommend the best middle grade books I come across. This year featured truly wonderful, beautiful books, and I hope they find fans among readers young and old.
by Tracy Badua
Balancing funny antics, heartbreaking histories, and a fast-paced plot, I was gripped by this story from beginning to end. The premise of this book is perfect, and Badua executes on it with such skill as to seem effortless. We follow poor Freddie, whose family has been cursed with minor inconveniences for generations. For him it manifests as clumsiness and a tendency to get into scrapes that usually result in embarrassment — what could be worse for a middle-schooler? — but it has also resulted in tanking his self confidence. It’s tough to put yourself out there and to try new things when everything always goes wrong. When he finds the amulet which is the source of the family curse, he teams up with his cousin Sharkie, his Apong Rosing, and the spirit of his great-uncle Ramon to track down someone wronged by their family a century ago. Freddie’s Filipino family is the heart of this story, with a lot of their quips making me laugh out loud, and curse stories are always compelling to me, especially when breaking the curse is tied to the hero’s personal growth. Freddie, and readers, will learn a lot about life’s challenges both big and small, laughing along the way.
by Arianne Costner
We start our story with Jack (a self-identified class clown) and the wacky antics he performs in a quest to become a video influencer on an app called MyTube (part TikTok, part YouTube). And Jack is very witty, very silly, and very charming.
We also get a cautionary tale about social media addiction, cyberbullying, and the fickleness of online popularity, as you can probably imagine from the premise.
But what really got me about this book was the way it explores how challenging it can be to make and keep friends, how easy it is for people to misunderstand each other’s intentions, and how you need to invest in friendships to foster them. With a little help from Jack’s guidance counselor, this book is almost like a guide for making new friends, complete with techniques to try and mistakes often made, all sweetly and cleverly folded into a story about Jack’s surface-level popularity masking the secret that his friends “always ditch him”. I feel like this book would have been a game-changer for me as a pre-teen and teen.
So to summarize: come for the jokes, stay for the life skills! What a wonderful book.
by Shakirah Bourne
Josephine is probably one of my favorite main characters I’ve read in middle grade. She’s precocious and headstrong but also deeply loving, fearless in her pursuit of being a star cricket player (despite no girls being on the team) yet fearful of the mysterious ocean surrounding her. Her attempts to sabotage her widower father’s dating life are funny but also terribly misguided, still somehow her motives feel so true and heartfelt that you can’t quite blame her either. Her distrust delivers unexpected advantages when she uncovers that his new girlfriend might be a supernatural creature of ill-intent, rooted in Caribbean folklore. What follows forces Josephine to question her own motives and acknowledge her grief around her mother’s death. I loved the lyrical language and vivid characters that make up Josephine’s village in this fun and thrilling read.
by Karina Evans
I had a giant pimple on my chin as I read this book. When I was 12, I believed you never got pimples after puberty, and that they’d be a thing of the past for my mid-30s self. Turns out that that’s not true. In my mid-30s, I still feel insecure about being liked, and I sometimes still find it difficult to have embarrassing conversations where I have to be vulnerable and honest. I also struggle with the way life is ever-changing and the pain of having friendships fade.
All that is to say, this is a book for any age. But it’s especially powerful for pre-teens, where everything is being experienced for the first time. Things that seem a bit more mundane to adults feel like the end of the world when you’re 12. This book perfectly captures that feeling.
Tahlia is delightfully dramatic, with a sharp sense of humor. The whole book had me laughing. She is prone to outrageous schemes because she will make every effort imaginable to avoid being embarrassed. This backfires spectacularly most of the time. And yet as the whirlwind of her first day on her period settles down, Tahlia figures out that conversations which she avoided at all costs weren’t so bad after all.
There’s a lot in her about periods, of course, and growing up. At one point a character observes that everyone who menstruates has at least one or two horror stories (even now, decades later, I still remember the mortification of a particular stained pair of ballet tights). As an adult reading it, his book also filled me with nostalgia for all of the pain of growing up (I’m pretty sure I had identical conversations about cardboard applicator tampons), and made me wish I’d had a book like this at that age to help me navigate similar challenges with my family and friends.
by Marti Dumas
This book was charming! I love the world Dumas has crafted, with its blend of flower witchcraft and technology all in an original magic school setting.
Hasani is a vibrant protagonist, her sights laser-focused on her goal to grow her YouTube channel at all costs. The result is a story that weaves through modern challenges of cyber-bullying, social media addiction, and divorce within the setting of a school steeped in classism, colonialism, and slavery, handling each of these topics through Hasani’s point of view so that the topics are accessible for any young reader.
This is a world worth revisiting, and I’m glad to hear there will be sequels so readers can continue to immerse themselves in the conflict and wonder of Les Belles Demoiselles.
Shad Hadid and the Alchemists of Alexandria
by George Jreije
Thrilling, mysterious, and charming, this is a magical adventure in an environment kids will delight in exploring. I loved the way the story folds passion for Lebanese food and nods to STEM in its fantastical world of alchemy, and I found our main character Shad’s love for his family and his new-found friends truly heartwarming.
As Shad seeks to unravel a mystery involving sinister necromancers at his magical new school, he will also navigate the heartarche that comes with losing his beloved grandmother, the pain of feeling unwanted by his distant mother, and the challenges of bullying from his classmate and step-brother. This is a lot for one kid to handle, but Shad handles everything with grace and a wonderful sense of humor.
Robot roosters, ancient libraries, descriptions of delicious cakes… what more could you ask for?
by Catherine Bakewell
I was very impressed with this lush fantasy filled with the language of classical music and featuring a very unique-feeling magic. The story stars Elissa, whose singing voice performs miracles on behalf of her goddess, and what follows is Elissa’s journey of faith–both in her goddess and herself–as she tries to help citizens suffering from war. The narrative is woven with prose that is literally musical, helping the world feel both familiar and inventive and infusing it with magic. As someone who was in choir from grade 4 and band from grade 5, I believe this book will really resonate with kids who are discovering their love of music with its rich worldbuilding and powerful, satisfying conclusion.
