Middle Grade

Audiobook: The Sherlock Society

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by James Ponti
Read by Marc Sanderlin
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Or listen at Libro.fm
Content: There are some intense moments. It’s in the Middle Grade (grades 3-5) section of the bookstore.

Alex Sherlock has taken inspiration from his last name and started The Sherlock Society at his middle school. It’s mostly just him and his friends Yadi and Lina, until the last day of school when Alex’s sister, Zoe, joins. She’s the one who comes up with the plan to take this society out into the larger world. With the help of their former-reporter grandfather, they set out to find a mystery to solve.

What starts out as trying to find Al Capone’s buried treasure in the Miami area turns into a discovery of corporate corruption and environmental disaster. Can they prove their case, or will the end up taking the fall?

Oh, this one was a lot of fun. I really liked Sanderlin’s narration; it was a good combination of earnest and deadpan to reflect the middle-grade book. Some moments were intense (I can see a younger kid being on the edge of their seat!) and it was often hilarious. I liked that the kids all had good parents (it was the grandpa out there helping them get into trouble, of sorts) and that their lawyer mom kept things mostly above board. It was a solid mystery, too; I guessed the ending but not too long before the characters got there.

I’ve had a coworker who has been trying to get me to read James Ponti’s spy series, and after this one, I think I really need to give it a try. He’s a fun writer, and I’m impressed with this book.

On a Wing and a Tear

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by Cynthia Leitich Smith
First sentence: “Hesei, cousins!”
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Content: There are a couple of intense moments. Otherwise, it’s a short book with short chapters. It’s in the Middle Grade (grades 3-5) Section of the bookstore, but I’d give it to a good younger reader as well.

Mel and Ray are off for spring break, and the only thing they want to do with Grandpa Halfmoon is go to a Chicago Cubs game. Except they are thrown a loop: Great-Grandfather Bat was injured and is recuperating in Mey and Ray’s backyard. And he’s been summoned to another Birds vs. Animals baseball game, and it’s up to Grandpa, Mel, and Ray to take Great-Grandfather Bat from Chicago to Georgia.

It’s a road trip!

There are adventures on the way, as they make the trek, stopping to see relatives in Kansas and Oklahoma, before getting Great-Grandfather Bat to his game.

On the one hand, this was a sweet modern folk tale. It has the cadence of a Bre’r Rabbit tale – the omniscient narrator talking directly to the reader, with folksy asides. And I do like the way Smith weaves in Native traditions, cultures, and challenges throughout the book. But it wasn’t quite a straight-up fantasy (Smith even says it’s not fantasy, it’s fiction, even though she warns not to interact with wild animals the way these characters do) but it wasn’t a realistic fiction book either. Maybe it was that there was a little bit of everything and the whole didn’t quite add up.

I didn’t hate the book, but it wasn’t my favorite either.

Magnolia Wu Unfolds it All

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by Chanel Miller
First sentence: “Magnolia Wu was almost ten.”
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Content: It’s heavily illustrated, short, and with lots of white space. It’s in the Middle Grade (grades 3-5) section of the bookstore, but I’d give it to a precocious younger reader as well.

While Magnolia likes her family’s laundromat, she feels like nothing ever happens. Then, the summer that she turns 10, she and her new friend Iris decide to return all the lost socks that have been left. What follows is an adventure as Magnolia and Iris learn about their neighbors in their New York City neighborhood.

It’s a cute little book, full of fun illustrations. There’s not much depth to it: Magnolia and Iris solve one little sock mystery after another while Magnolia learns the value of hardworking, caring parents, and Iris and Magnolia navigate a friendship.

Cute, especially for those beginning/struggling readers.

The Night War

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by Kimberly Brubaker Bradley
First sentence: “I could hear sirens.”
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Content: There are intense moments, including a round-up of Jews to go to concentration camps. It’s in the Middle Grade (grades 3-5) section of the bookstore.

Miri and her parents are living in Nazi-occupied Paris in 1942, after fleeing Germany after the kristalnacht. They’re making do in a small apartment, but they have Jewish neighbors and it’s working. That is, until the French police raid the neighborhood and round all the Jews in France up. Miri escapes with her neighbor’s 2-year-old daughter, Nora, and after finding refuge in a nunnery (the nun saved her from an interaction with a Nazi soldier), she is separated from Nora and sent to a Catholic school in the French countryside. She has to pretend to be a Catholic, which is hard. The only bright side is that she’s close to the Vichy border, and escape. Can she find Nora and get across before she is found out?

On the one hand: this is a well-written book. (I have issues with the ghost, but aside from that.) Bradley knows how to pace a story and knows how to make a historical story relatable (in this one: all religions are valid, we shouldn’t be afraid of those who are not like us, we shouldn’t believe the propaganda we hear). However, I am just so tired of World War II books. I just am. I know these stories need to be told, but I am so so very tired of them. And, I don’t think that the ghost in this one was necessary. Bradley used the ghost as a narrative cop-out – Miri was the only one who could see the ghost and it helped her get out of sticky situations.

I just wanted more (or something entirely different) from this one.

The Cookie Crumbles

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by Tracy Badua and Alechia Dow
First sentence: “Generally speaking, cookies don’t kill people.”
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Content: There is talk of almost-murder, and there are some intense situations. It’s in the Middle Grade (grades 3-5) section of the bookstore.

Laila loves to bake. Lucy is a budding reporter. They both want to get into the prestigious Sunderland boarding school, and the cookie competition hosted by the school, with the grand prize of a scholarship, is the only way they can make it work. The plan was for Laila to bake and be brilliant and for Lucy to write and be brilliant. What they didn’t anticipate was one of the judges – Chef Remy – almost dying after eating one of Laila’s cookies. Now, they need to figure out who tried to kill Chef Remy (it wasn’t Laila!) – especially since there was a storm that wiped out all the ways to get into and out of Sunderland.

This was a fun little mystery. The stakes were high – a lot of the other kids had motives to hurt Chef Remy – but it wasn’t so high that it would scare younger kids. The clues were there to figure it out if you were paying attention (I did), but it was clever enough to keep me entertained. I liked that the authors conceived of a clever way to get parents out of the picture – it was kind of like a sleep-away camp for the competition – so that it wasn’t weird that the kids were running around the school by themselves. I liked the alternating chapters between Laila and Lucy, and I thought it was all done very well.

A really solid Middle Grade mystery.

Audiobook: Buffalo Dreamer

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by Violet Duncan
Read by Ashley Callingbull
Support your local independent bookstore: buy it there!
Or listen at Libro.fm
Content: There are some tough subjects, including the residential schools, but they are handled in an age-appropriate way. It’s in the Middle Grade (grades 3-5) section of the bookstore.

Summer is looking forward to a relaxing summer at the rez in Alberta where her mom grew up. But this year, there is a change: they have discovered a mass grave at a closed-down residential school where Summer’s grandfather was forced to attend. Additionally, Summer is having vivid dreams about a girl who ran away from a residential school and walked through a blizzard to escape.

It’s not a long book or even a harrowing one. But it is a sweet story about respecting and learning history, even (or maybe especially) hard history. Summer’s mom and aunties doesn’t think she’s ready to learn the history, and her grandfather is hesitant to speak about it, but when Summer shares the dreams, they are more willing to admit that talking about the hard and painful history can be a healing thing. I also appreciated learning about Summer’s heritage and family traditions as we went along; Duncan was excellent at weaving the small details in with the larger story.

The narrator was excellent as well; I really love listening to books by Native authors in audio because I know I would have no idea how to pronounce some of the words. I thoroughly enjoyed this one.

Ultraviolet

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by Aida Salazar
First sentence: “Who invented love, anyway?”
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Content: There is some sexual objectification of middle-school girls by middle-school boys. It’s in the YA section (grades 6-8) of the bookstore.

At the start of eighth grade Elio Selis starts noticing changes. Specifically girls. There are other changes too, with his body and with his friends, but all of a sudden girls are on his radar. Camellia in particular. He most definitely likes her, and she likes him back. Things are perfect for a while – ultraviolet, Elio things – but then things go south. Camellia takes up with a guy that Elio thinks is trash, and his heart is broken. He discovers he has an undetected heart problem that needs to be fixed. His parents decide that he and his dad need to join a Circle as a way to express and learn about masculinity. It’s all very confusing.

In the afterword, Salazar says she wrote this for her son, once she realized that there weren’t many books out there depicting what it’s like for boys to go through puberty, to feel their feels, to explore what it means, and how to be a man, and she wanted to write one. Which she nails. I didn’t particularly like puberty or being 13 or eighth grade, but I think Salazar gets all the big emotions and the big feelings and the confusion that goes along with that time in one’s life. She handles it all with grace and with compassion: Both Elio and Camellia make mistakes as they try to figure out what “relationships” and “liking” and just what feeling feelings mean. And it’s wonderfully age-appropriate. It’s an excellent book to hand kids in the 11- to 12-year-old range, on the cusp of all of this, to help them navigate it. I’m not sure there are many adults who would buy this for their boys, but honestly: they should. It’s an excellent book about growing up, learning to be a compassionate and kind person, and how to navigate an incredibly confusing and difficult time of life.

The Tenth Mistake of Hank Hooperman

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by Gennifer Choldenko
First sentence: “My name is Hank Hooperman, but my little sister calls me Pooperman.”
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Content: There is some mild swearing and bad parenting (including drinking and driving). It’s in the Middle Grade (grades 3-5) section of the bookstore.

Hank has a problem: his mother left a week ago to run an errand, leaving 11-year-old Hank in charge of his three year old sister Boo. They’ve managed, so far, but they’ve run out of food and money. So, Hank decides what he needs to do is find Lou Ann, the person his mother put down as his emergency contact. Once there, though, Hank has a whole new set of problems: Lou Ann isn’t fond of “teenagers” (even though Hank is only 11), and she really isn’t fond of the way his mother just left. As Hank tries to find her, and to find footing in this life that he’s suddenly been thrust into, the only thing that grounds him is he knows that he and Boo need to stick together.

This was a gut punch of a book that went down so well. Choldenko knows how to write kids, and knows how to write difficult situations that give the A book weight without dragging it down. I liked that Hank still had good days – he made friends at his new school, found out that he liked basketball, and learned to rely a bit on the adults around him, instead of needing to do it all himself – and yet, Choldenko didn’t brush over all the trauma that Hank had to deal with. His mother being unreliable, Lou Ann being super strict and not liking Hank much at all, the fear that he and Boo would be separated. There was a lot of heartbreak here. But there was also a lot of joy, which I suppose is what life is.

I’m not sure if it’ll appeal to kids, but I really liked this one.

Drawing Deena

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by Hena Khan
First sentence: “I wince as the sharp metal tool scrapes against my molars and pricks my gums.”
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Content: There are some tense moments, and Deena experiences a panic attack. It’s in the Middle Grade (grades 3-5) section of the bookstore.

What Deena really wants to do is draw. She’s good at it, and she loves it. However, her parents are always super stressed about money, and they are always pushing her towards doing something that will help her earn a living. They work hard – her mother has a clothing business, that Deena is sure she could help with – but they are unwilling to spend their money on art lessons. There are other money issues, and it all weighs on Deena, until she starts having anxiety attacks.

This is a quiet little book, without high-stakes conflict, but I thought that Khan did well with the characterizations. I could feel Deena’s parents’ stress, and understood their hesitation to spend money (I’ve been there!). I could understand why Deena wanted to both pursue her art but also to make her parents happy. I got the friendship conflicts and Deena’s jealousy of her cousin. I also liked her portrayal of anxiety, especially in someone who didn’t know they had it. Nothing in the book was high-stakes, but Khan is a good writer and while the book was quiet, it was a good sort of quiet.

I really liked it.

The Thirteenth Circle

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by MarcyKate Connolly and Kathryn Holmes
First sentence: “There was an alien in Cat Mulvaney’s bedroom.”
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Content: There are some intense moments. It’s in the Middle Grade section of the bookstore.

Dani desperately wants her parents to take her interest in science seriously. Cat desperately wants her father to pay attention to her. And so both need to win the McMurray Youth Science competition and get into ScienceU. The problem: they’re working together and Cat wants to prove that aliens exist, and Dani knows that they don’t. It just so happens that every 13 years crop circles appear in a nearby field, and they’re due to appear this year. And Cat’s figured out when and where. All they have to do is gather evidence… and see whose theory is the solid one.

It’s a mild spoiler to say that this is solidly realistic fiction; there are, in fact, no aliens. But, Dani and Cat do uncover a conspiracy and they do end up realizing that working together is better than working against each other. I liked this one well enough; I liked how Dani and Cat would gather evidence and then work out hypotheses based on the evidence. It was unbelievable how much time these 13-year-olds spent running around the town late at night, but I can forgive that. And the whole conspiracy was a bit over the top, though it fit the story.

Will it be my favorite book this year? No, but it’s a good one.