CJMK – Middle Grade Carousel

Who I Am (in book titles)

If there’s one thing that we love here at Middle Grade Carousel, it’s a game! Upon spying a challenge issued by Christie Megill on Twitter, we flew to our home library with an eye toward book titles that say something about our personalities. Here’s what we found.

CJ’s Stack

Hoot by Carl Hiaasen
Bliss by Kathryn Littlewood
The Peculiar by Stefan Bachmann
Savvy by Ingrid Law
The Exact Location of Home by Kate Messner
The Honest Truth by Dan Geminhart

Find more from CJ on her blog!

Elza’s Stack

The Problim Children by Natalie Lloyd
A Taste for Monsters by Matthew J. Kirby
All the Colors of Magic by Valija Zinck
I Am Pusheen the Cat by Claire Belton
“Shouldn’t You be in School?” by Lemony Snicket
Magic or Not? by Edward Eager

Follow Elza for more Middle Grade fun!

Can you find book titles that describe you in some way?

Book Spine Poetry

Elza has been hosting #NewYearsReads2021, a series of challenges and games on social media designed to kick off the new year of reading. The photo challenge prompt for today was “Book Spine Poetry”.

CJ decided to give it a whirl with books from our Middle Grade shelves. Here’s what she came up with!

The honest truth:
parked
trapped
every day

waiting for normal
nothing ever happens here
estranged grump
the gauntlet in real life
absolutely normal chaos

tut-tut
anyway
restart!

drumroll, please

The crossroads
fearless

wish
bloom
sweep
smile
wonder
bliss

Some kind of courage
A crooked kind of perfect
Ambush the wish

Hatching magic
Writing magic
the color of my words
charmed life

sunny side up
wizard at work
things that are absolutely truly
extraordinary

Check out #NewYearsReads2021 and share your own adventures with book spine poetry!

Follow CJ’s blog for more Middle Grade fun!

CJ: New Year – New Reading Goal

Check out how CJ plans to read in the new year!

C. J. Milbrandt

Doing it Different. This year, I’m switching up how I choose the books I’ll read. I’m a big fan of reading challenges, and I regularly participate in three:

A to Z Challenge (Great Middle Grade Reads)
Series Challenge (Great Middle Grade Reads)
Reading Bingo Boards (Middle Grade Carousel)

The only problem is that I’m always choosing books because they fit the challenge. And waiting to read many books I’m eager for … until they fit a challenge. I’m tired of putting them off! So this year, I decided to scan my shelves and compile a list of 100 Middle Grade Books that I will (finally) read in 2021. Many are recent releases. Some are part of a series or trilogy I started. And all of them are books I can’t wait to pick up!

Since many of these books are long(ish), I set my Goodreads Reading Challenge goal much…

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Best Reads of 2019

Hello from behind the scenes! We’re CJ and Elza, the mother-daughter duo responsible for Middle Grade Carousel’s challenges and content. As you may have guessed, we’re both avid bookworms who enjoy stocking our home library with kid-friendly reading material.

We’re so excited to show and tell and share what we’ve been reading, so you might be seeing more of us this year.

To kick off our brand new blogging schedule, we’ve decided to pick and share the Top 5 best books we read in 2019.

Continue reading “Best Reads of 2019”