I laughed. I cried. I read a book.

Let’s be clear about one thing—I am not some blubbering mama’s boy who leaks tears like a 1949 VW Beetle leaks oil. I just happen to really like books that make me cry. Or at least ones that make me feel like I could cry if I wasn’t so busy being a manly man. Got it? Good.

And speaking of me being a manly man. . . . Let the record show that I greatly enjoy books that make me laugh, too. In fact, one of my goals in life is to absolutely, positively not become one of those old guys whose face is a bunch of permanent scowl marks. I’m gunning for a roadmap of laugh-lines.

Call me a goofball. Call me mentally unstable. But don’t call me overly serious.

Still, I do really like books that make me cry.

I guess it comes down to what Kurt Vonnegut once said:

All of fiction is a practical joke—making people care, laugh, cry, or be nauseated or whatever by something which absolutely is not going on at all. It’s like saying, “Hey, your pants are on fire.”

So maybe it’s too simple to say I like books that make me cry. I like books that make me feel. I want to be so wrapped up in the lie fiction created by the author that I care deeply about what happens to the characters. Unlike Rhett Butler in Gone with the Wind, I want to give a d**n.

So now, in no particular order, I offer five of my all-time-favorite-middle-grade novels. They all made me laugh. They all made me cry. And a couple even made me do both on the same page.

	Umbrella Summer by Lisa Graff
Okay for Now by Gary D. Schmidt
	Walk Two Moons by Sharon Creech
Every Soul a Star by Wendy Mass
	One for the Murphys by Lynda Mullaly Hunt

So what do you look for in a book? Got any laugh-and-cry titles I should add to my to-read shelf on Goodreads? Feel free to post below.

T. P. Jagger

Along with his MUF posts, T. P. Jagger can be found at www.tpjagger.com, where he provides brief how-to writing-tip videos as The 3-Minute Writing Teacher plus original, free readers’ theater scripts for middle-grade classrooms. For T. P.’s 10-lesson, video-based creative writing course, check him out on Curious.com.