You’re not alone if you feel like there’s a gap in the middle-grade market. There are plenty of books for the younger and middle end of middle-grade readers, but where middle grade ends and YA begins? There’s a big ol’ hole, says middle school librarians Christina Chatel and Marcia Kochel in a guest article for School Library Journal.
They write:
We do not believe that 12- to 15- year old readers just need a few more books aimed at their interests and developmental level. We submit that young teens need their own publishing category and we propose to call this category Young Teen Lit.
When you’ve aged out of books aimed at 4th-6th grade but you’re not quite ready for YA, you need more! In another guest essay, Kochel says:
I’m a middle school librarian and I just got the latest issue of Booklist in the mail. I’m looking for books for my middle school readers. I search through all of the reviews for youth and find almost no titles for seventh and eighth graders–not in Middle Readers or Older Readers or Youth Nonfiction or Graphic Novels. Almost every book for Older Readers is recommended for grades 9-12, and every single book for Middle Readers has a lower age range of grade 3, 4, or 5. Surely publishers don’t think that middle schoolers have the same interests and intellectual capacity as 8-10 year olds? Are there really no books being published for middle school students? Can this be true?
Making more room for upper middle grade, young teen lit, or whatever else publishers, educators, librarians, writers, and the readers themselves call it is something we’d love to see here, too. If you’ve got books that are perfect for 7th, 8th, and 9th graders, share them below.
