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.
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PLAYING THROUGH THE TURNAROUND and QUAGMIRE TIARELLO COULDN’T BE BETTER. Both have protagonists in 8th grade and are written with middle schoolers in mind.
Thanks for this post! I speak on panels about this topic a lot and have two upper MG novels that fill the gap. IT HAPPENED ON SATURDAY (2/23) is the story of a 13-year-old girl named Julia who narrowly escapes becoming a victim of human trafficking and must find the courage to tell her friends the truth about what happened so they don’t end up becoming victims too. It includes themes of middle school friendship, mental health, social media safety, and self-acceptance. RACING THE CLOUDS just released and is the story of 13-year-old Sage, who blames herself for the accident leading to her mom’s opioid addiction and visits her mom’s parents for the first time in her life, hoping to mend the rift in her family. It includes themes of forgiveness of both self and others, the complexity of family relationships, and finding your way through a hard time with resilience and hope. More information about both can be found on my website: https://sydneydunlap.com/books/
Last year, I published “Getting What I Deserve,” a novel that looks at the dilemma faced by a boy whose worst enemy shows up on his doorstep asking for forgiveness. Is Mark asking for forgiveness, or is this just another cruel game?
It’s available on Amazon in paperback, ebook hardcover and audiobook:
https://a.co/d/3tTKgZJ