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With a name like Grimsbane, a person is bound to find connections to death, destruction, woe, and gloom. And readers will find all that in Joan Reardon’s The Grimsbane Family Witch Hunters. Set in Witchless, Indiana, this novel for middle grade readers features Anna and Billy Grimsbane, twin siblings who are about to turn thirteen. Billy is a “nerd extraordinaire” and a lover of scones. He is also organized, intelligent, and fearless. Anna, on the other hand, is more impulsive. She is also naturally agile, protective, and loyal. Both are eager to enter the family business, although for very different reasons. A family of witchRead More →

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Readers who appreciate survival stories like Hatchet by Gary Paulsen will likely enjoy Flying Through Water by Mamle Wolo. Set in Tovime village in Ghana, Wolo’s novel shares the adventures of Sena who attends junior high, plays football, farms with his family, and dreams of escaping the toil and toll of poverty. He envisions “driving a sports car very day to a high school where students wore whatever they wanted, and talked to teachers however they liked, and fought and sang and shouted and danced in the corridors and flirted and kissed and played sports and never seemed to do any schoolwork” (48). Sena’s realityRead More →

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Fans of The Chronicles of Narnia and The Hobbit will likely enjoy Blackberry Fox by Kathrin Tordasi. This fantasy adventure will take readers on a journey into the Otherworld, a place where Welsh myths and legends come to life for twelve-year-old Portia Beale and Ben Rees. Driven by curiosity, Portia steals Aunt Bramble’s key, follows a trickster fox, and opens the door to the Borderlands. The fox turns out to be a shape-shifter named Robin Goodfellow, and Portia has no idea what she had done until her previous reality begins to unravel. Despite knowing that humans always end up losing when they make deals withRead More →

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Middle grade readers will likely relate to Jen Wilde’s recent novel, Paige Not Found. Wilde’s book features eleven-year-old neuroatypical Paige Wells whose insecurities provide obstacles but whose courage is commendable. Paige dreams of being just like her favorite teacher Ms. Penny: “Happy, funny, wearing kooky glasses, and doing a job she loves” (38). When Paige discovers that she has a mechanical device in her brain to monitor her moods and serotonin levels, she is angry. Feeling like a lab rat because her parents signed on to a research trial with Nucleus, owned by tech giant, Elliot Preston, who is about to sell the failing companyRead More →

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In her debut novel, Paper Dragons, the first in what sets itself up for a sequel or series, Siobhan McDermott has created a fantasy adventure story about twelve-year-old Yeung Zhi Ging. Although Zhi Ging has grown up in the village of Fei Chui, she wants to be its next Silhouette. When she catches the eye of a Silhouette Scout named Reishi, Zhi Ging fights hard to secure his recommendation. Even though she doesn’t finish her exam, somehow—whether by magic or by fate—she gets named Fei Chui’s Second Silhouette and gains access to the training in Hok Woh, which is the underwater home of the immortalRead More →

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Set in Oahu, Hawaii, in 1941, Heroes by Alan Gratz is a novel about the attack on Pearl Harbor. Two thirteen-year-old boys: Stanley Summer and Frank McCoy, whose fathers are pilots for the U.S. Navy, bond over their love of comic books. The two see the fleet of ships on Battleship Row as a metaphor for superheroes: the Justice Society of America. Frank is a writer and Stanley an illustrator. Together, they invent characters, write their origin stories, and draw them into situations where they emerge as heroes. However, Frank feels a bit like a fraud. Ever since The Incident in Florida, their last militaryRead More →

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Set in Minnesota, Just Keep Walking is a middle grade novel written in part to encourage resilience and perseverance in tweens. Erin Soderberg Downing creates twelve-year-old Josephine Conlan, aka Jo, to carry her message about not giving up in the face of adversity and challenge. Jo’s older brother, Jake, is in college now, and her dad side-stepped into a new family despite his promise to take his daughter on the Superior Hiking Trail the summer of her seventh grade year.  With all of her alone time, Jo experiences “too many uncomfortable silences. Too much time to think about the way things used to be. TooRead More →

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Set in Colorado, Backcountry by Jenny Goebel tells the story of thirteen-year-old Emily Walker. Daughter of a mom with grit and determination who tells her to play it safe and an athletic dad who tells her to go for it, Em is a lead attacker for the Impalers’ volleyball team. Strong, adventurous, and Identifying as an athlete, Em feels like she has to compete with Dad’s real estate clients for attention. Because a bad appraisal or inspection often takes precedence over Emily and her mother, Emily believes that her dad only pays attention to her life when she is winning tournaments and trophies. When EmilyRead More →

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Bobert Bougainvillea is eleven years old and feels virtually invisible. Actually, he might be oscillating between visibility and invisibility, given that there is all kinds of evil scheming taking place in Nefaria. Such is the opening of Adi Alsaid’s first novel for middle grade readers, The Bravest Warrior in Nefaria. When Bobert is in a visible phase, he invites some classmates to the town square to do homework while he waits for his parents. Here the group discusses Nefaria’s gumball machine which has been cursed by Evil Wizard Matt.  In every corner of the kingdom, both commoners and nobles are known to be dreaming upRead More →