Middle Grade Carousel is a series of monthly challenges for lovers and readers of middle grade books. Our theme for March is…
We’ve always been big fans of art. The colors! The compositions! But we also love words. The sounds! The synonyms! So it makes sense that if you put the two together, we’re going to get excited.
Mom’s eyes darkened. “Hamlet, you know how I feel about the use of contractions.”
The Total Tragedy of a Girl Named Hamlet
Erin Dionne
Have you recently read a book that starts with punctuation in the title?
In many ways, the ghost in the jar had been a thorn in my side for ages….It was thoroughly, defiantly, exultantly reprehensible; in fact, if you wrote down the ten most unsavory character traits you could imagine, the skull possessed the nine worst on the list, and it only lacked the tenth because that one wasn’t quite bad enough.
The Creeping Shadow
Jonathan Stroud
If you assigned a number to each letter of the alphabet—a somewhat common practice in Bach’s time, apparently—J. S. Bach’s last name added up to fourteen. B (2) + A (1) + C (3) + H (8) = 14. He used the sum of the letters in his name in creative ways in his compositions … it was Bach’s way of building in a cryptic “signature.”
Giant Pumpkin Suite
Melanie Heuiser Hill
Have you recently read a book that starts with numbers in the title?
Have you recently read a book that starts with the letter Z?
Have you recently read a book that starts with the letter Y?
Have you recently read a book that starts with the letter X?
Middle Grade Carousel 