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In her novel for middle grade readers entitled What Happened Then, Erin Soderberg Downing writes about family and the generational trauma that gets passed down. Twelve-year-old Avery knows she’s best in small doses. “Every time I try to fade, I fail . . . and flare instead. In a crayon box of colors, I’m the shocking pink and laser lemon” (5). Although she wishes to be less exuberant and less talkative, she hasn’t yet mastered moderation. “I know I’m too much. Too loud, too annoying, too big for any room I step into. . . . I wish I could edit and refine myself, likeRead More →

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In The House of Found Objects: A Bea Bellerose Mystery, Jo Beckett-King introduces middle grade readers to her twelve-year-old brainiac detective. When Bea’s parents travel to New Orleans for a conference, rather than allowing their daughter to remain in New Jersey, they send her to Paris to visit Aunt Juliette. Yet, Aunt Juliette, a journalist for a weekly news magazine in France, is too busy to play tour guide. And Grandma Sylvie, aka Mamie, is too burdened by her antiques business to share the sites. When Bea’s mom and dad first told her they were sending her to France, they’d made the trip sound likeRead More →

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Just as William Blake, in his poem “The Tyger,” explores the duality of human nature and our potential for both good and evil, SF Said takes up the task in his novel Tyger illustrated by Dave McKean.  Although the novel is targeted for middle grade readers, its themes, morals, and complexity suit a much broader readership. Both the poem and the novel ultimately suggest that the imagination is the location of a miraculous but dangerous kind of creative strength. The willingness to “dare,” as the poem would put it, to create anything of any worth out of the “fire” of creativity, requires both bravery andRead More →

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Xavier Oak is the protagonist in Kenneth Oppel’s recent young adult novel, Best of All Worlds. Zay, as he is called in the book, loves gaming, especially playing Dungeons and Dragons with his older brother Sam and his friend Serena. When his dad and his pregnant wife Nia insist that Zay accompany them on their annual vacation to the cottage, Zay resists but eventually relents. Sometime in the night, their cottage is relocated and set down in the middle of a strange farm where there is no cell service. Soon, Zay and his father discover that they are all trapped inside a transparent dome. TryRead More →

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Sabina Khan writes her novel Meet Me in Mumbai in two parts. Part I focuses on the life of Ayesha Hameed, a Muslim teen from India who is finishing high school in the United States so as to maximize her future potential. Here, she meets Suresh Khanna, a Hindu teen also from Mubai who is an exotic stranger but who totally “gets her.” As fellow Mubaiites, the pair share common rituals, foods, and similar backstories. Eventually, they fall in love, and after a glorious weekend together over the Thanksgiving holiday, Ayesha discovers she is pregnant. All of Ayesha’s lies and subterfuge have turned her intoRead More →

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Mikki Daughtry explores a philosophical question in her novel Time After Time. As she weaves two stories: that of Elizabeth Post and Patricia Murphy from 1925 and that of Libby Monroe and Tish O’Connell in the present, she asks: Is every life a cycle with no real end, where “time after time,” we come back reincarnated to try again, “to grow, evolve, get new chances . . . to do things better. To do things right” (246)? Daughtry takes readers on her wondering spree, which begins in the past but threads into the present. A Victorian style house on Mulberry Lane is the lynch pinRead More →

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Twelve-year-old Valeria Salomón loves fútbol, aka soccer. Because of her talent, her teammates have nicknamed her Magic. The protagonist in The Beautiful Game by Yamile Saied Méndez, Magic plays for a boys’ team, the Overlords until her period arrives and she gets kicked off the team. Dedicated to the sport she loves and not ready to give it up, Val approaches Coach Blume and asks for a place on her all-girls’ team, the Amazons. Although Val missed try-outs and the team roster is full, Coach Blume decides to “accommodate for exceptional circumstances” (144). As Val tries to find a place in her new sisterhood, sheRead More →

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Eight years ago, as just a nine-year-old, Darius Logan lost his parents and baby brother in The Attack. Since the band of ACU-64 Killbots wreaked havoc, destroying his life and devastating his neighborhood, Darius has been fighting to survive. His juvenile probation officer, Edith O’Malley is the closest thing to family he has looking out for him. However, Darius is a fighter who refuses to give in to fear. “If he knew anything at all, he knew how to fight—it came as naturally as breathing” (9). Eventually, Darius gets himself into trouble with the law, and he can’t fight his way out of the sentence.Read More →

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Emily Taylor shares her vivid imagination for magical worlds in her recent young adult novel, The Otherwhere Post. Taylor tells the tale of Maeve Abenthy who has lived for the past seven years with the knowledge that she has a murderer’s blood running through her veins.  Believing her father unleashed the Aldervine in Inverly, separating families and causing the deaths of many innocent people, Maeve feels cursed, so she hides behind aliases. Despite his abhorrent legacy, Maeve, a lover of the written word, has always found fascination in her father’s work with scriptomancy, “the art of enchanting any piece of existing handwriting” (8). When sheRead More →