reading, reviewing, and recommending middlegrade stories
Mom says physical exercise is healthy and important but it’s risky and dangerous. So, I have a bike but it’s stationary. She’s too worried I’ll fall and injure myself to let me out on the open road. Or even the open driveway. But I have complete freedom to bike in place as long as I wear a helmet.
The Incredible Magic of Being
Kathryn Erskine
The Henry on the bus was not a town in Kansas. He was simply a twelve-year-old boy on a slow bus from Boston.
100 Cupboards
N. D. Wilson
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
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
There were no such things as dragons, were there? Only in stories. Only in tales told around the hearth on winter’s nights, to set you shivering with cozy fear.
No Such Thing As Dragons
Philip Reeve
The Frost Giant peered down at him. There were icicles in its eyebrows, and its eyes were the color of lake ice.
Odd and the Frost Giants
Neil Gaiman
