Middle Grade Fiction

Recently back home after a stint in foster care, twelve-year-old Sharkita (Black) lives in fear of again being separated from her precocious sister, Lilli, and developmentally disabled brother, Lamar. While Mama goes out—sometimes for days at a time—Kita cooks dinner, pays the bills, cleans the house, and cares for her younger siblings.

Eden (white) is struggling to find her middle school footing after an injury ended the gymnastics career that once consumed her life. Although Eden is proud of her mom’s rags-to-riches story as the founder and CEO of a menstrual products company, she’s dismayed when her mom is invited to give a talk on Career Day and humiliated by the unpredictable period jokes and teasing that ensue.

Safiya, 13, thinks her mom doesn’t understand her; she certainly doesn’t understand Safiya’s passion for gaming. Safiya (multiracial) suspects that the tension between them wasn’t helped when she chose to live with her dad (white) after her parents’ divorce.

Admired for being smart and “nice,” the girls in Shaindy Goodman’s sixth grade class at Bais Yaakov Orthodox Jewish day school don’t bully Shaindy outright, but neither do they befriend or include her.

Three compelling storylines move back and forth between the first months of the pandemic in 2020, and Ukraine and Brooklyn in 1932 and 1933.

An author’s note reveals the inspiration behind this delightfully odd retelling: A year after first stumbling upon the Tyrolean folktale “The Skull,” Klassen reread it and found that he misremembered significant parts of it. From that slightly off tale, “[his] brain’s version,” he wrote The Skull.

In this follow-up to In the Beautiful Country, Anna (Taiwanese name Ai Shi) is finally adjusting to life in the United States, where she is finishing sixth grade.

Johannes takes his job as the “eyes” of the seaside park where he’s lived in the wild since he was a puppy very seriously.

Eleven-year-old Ginny’s dad is an army doctor. Ginny (white) and her older sister, Allie, are blindsided when they learn his posting to Afghanistan in the new year has been changed; he leaves shortly after their expected move from North Carolina to Maryland at the end of the school year.

Twelve-year-old Wesley Wilder (Upper Skagit) starts the day nervous but excited on two fronts. Her poem, “We Still Belong,” is in the school newspaper for Indigenous Peoples’ Day, and she plans to ask a boy named Ryan Thomas, whom she’s gotten to know through gaming club, to the upcoming school dance.