I had a friend reach out recently for book recommendations for her 4th and 6th graders who are voracious readers and dozens of books immediately came to mind. That was the age when I read everything the library had to offer at a nearly terrifying rate. My mother would drop me off at the library for an hour or so, I would find ten new books for the week, and we would repeat that every week for years.

here are the books I pulled together to recommend for my friend:

Splitting this into three sections:

Authors: Gail Carson Levine, Madeleine L’Engle, Jane Austen, Frances Hodgson Burnett, Louisa May Alcott, Roald Dahl, Judy Blume, Tolkien,

Series: harry potter, percy Jackson, Nancy Drew, Artemis Fowl, A Series of Unfortunate Events, His Dark Materials, Anne of Green Gables, Chronicles of Narnia, The Wizard of Oz, The Royal Diaries, Peter and the starcatchers

One offs: The Little Prince, The Tale of Despereaux, Tuck Everlasting, Hoot, Island of the Blue Dolphin, Esperanza Rising, Harriett the spy

The moral of just about every book I loved at that time was “do the right thing, even if it is the hard thing” and I think that is one of the most important lessons anyone can learn. As Neil Gaiman so beautifully put it in Coraline, “Fairy tales are more than true, not because they tell us that dragons exist but because they tell us that dragons can be beaten.”

Are there any you think I missed? What do your middle graders love to read?

XO,

Kate