Middle Grade Fiction

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.

Noah’s best friend, Lewis, was killed in a car accident several months ago … Noah has not only lost his best friend but the essential sense of being known, seen, and understood.

A boisterous yet tender tale set along the Silk Road in the late 11th century begins with an orphaned boy, Omar, rescued from attack by Samir, a merchant traveling as part of a small caravan.

The town of Grin and Bear It, Nebraska, is located in the National Quiet Zone, an area in which scientists listen for radio signals from outer space, and where interfering signals like internet, Wi-Fi, cell phones, radios, and microwave ovens are prohibited.

Swara, almost 9, lives in apartment building in Bengaluru, India. When the pandemic lockdown begins, she especially misses her maternal grandmother, whom she calls Pitter Paati.

Vale’s dad is a folklorist and her mom a geoscientist. Although Vale, 12, enjoys Papi’s stories, trekking near their Colombian home with him and her younger brother, Julián, in search of a patasola, a one-legged woman who sucks her victims’ blood (“Kind of like a vampire, but cooler”) isn’t her idea of a good time even before an earthquake strikes and Papi is injured.