Author and librarian Ann Clare LeZotte is deaf, so this story of a deaf girl living in community that is half deaf and half hearing on Martha’s Vineyard is born out of the author’s own experiences, for what that is worth. I do think it’s always enlightening to read “own voices” stories when they are available and well written.

The story takes place in the early 1900’s when there actually was such a community of mixed hearing and non-hearing persons living together on Martha’s Vineyard. This community used their own version of sign language (MVSL) to communicate, and that sign language formed part of the basis for ASL (American Sign Language) years later in the mid-nineteenth century.

Mary Lambert, the protagonist of the story, is a deaf girl who has grown up up safe and protected in little island community. Nevertheless, before the story opens, Mary’s family has experienced a devastating tragedy: Mary’s brother George died in accident. And no one else knows that the accident was Mary’s fault. George saved her life at the expense of his own.

Mary’s mother particularly doted on George, and Mary is unsure about whether her mother truly loves and cares for her, now that George is gone. At this point the story veers off into the coming of a stranger to the community, a stranger who wants to study the deaf people on the island and find out “what’s wrong with them.” The problem is the stranger’s prejudices; the islanders, hearing or not, don’t think anything is wrong with being deaf.

This novel definitely gives new perspectives on both deafness and Native American attitudes and culture. (Some of the minor characters in the book are Wampanoag, and the author goes to great lengths to write about the Wampanoag respectfully and accurately.) About halfway through Something Bad happens, and the story gets exciting. I really did enjoy and learn from reading this book about a place and time in history that was previously unknown to me.

However, there are some weaknesses in the book. It starts off slow and veers off onto various rabbit trails that ultimately go nowhere. What is the point of the Wampanoag servant characters, father and daughter, who work for Mary’s father and Mary’s best friend’s family? In fact, what is the point of pages and pages about Mary and her best friend, Nancy and their escapades? Why do the two friends apologize to each other at the end of the book? (Maybe I missed something?) The ending itself went on way too long, several chapters of getting home and tearful reunion. And yes, the setting and characters were unique and interesting, but the friendships in the story were odd and unfocused.

Hank Hudson can’t stand one more day of listening to his teacher read aloud the horrible, sad book about a boy who is hiding in the forest from the Nazis. He’s already protested and asked to be excused, to no avail. So he does the only thing left to do: burn the book.

With this scene of attempted book burning (no one is harmed and even the book survives the attempt), we are introduced to Hank who loves rocks, and perceptive readers will understand that ten year old Hank is “on the spectrum” even though the label of autism is not introduced until later in the story. Hank’s unsuccessful book burning catches the attention of a girl in his class, Maisie, who is looking for an accomplice and a friend to help her rescue a dog named Booler, and off we go with Maisie and Hank on a series of madcap, slightly dangerous, highly illegal adventures.

Maisie is not autistic, but she is quite immature and fixated on Booler, a dog with a seizure disorder. Maisie sympathizes with the next door neighbor’s dog to an excessive degree. Hank, on the other hand, just wants a friend, and he finds one in Maisie, even though the two fifth graders both have some things to learn about true friendship.

This middle grade fiction book is a funny, easy read with a good message–“different is not less”–and a good heart. The story is a sensitive yet entertaining portrayal of autism and other differences and of good intentions gone awry.

Korean American seventh grader Pippa Park gets a scholarship to a rich private school where she tries to ingratiate herself with the popular clique while covering up her working class, public school background. She’s also busy with trying to understand algebra, play winning basketball, and take care of her chores and responsibilities at home. The popular girls get mean; Pippa gets exhausted, enmeshed in lies and half-truths; and the good-looking math tutor that Pippa’s sister hired for her barely acknowledges Pippa’s existence.

It’s a fairly cliche plot with a standard cast of characters. However, the thing that made this book fun for me is that it’s a “reimagining” of the Charles Dickens classic Great Expectations. Pippa is Pip, of course. Her rich math tutor, Eliot Haverford, who lives in a mansion and deals with unreasonable family expectations, is a take-off on Estella. Pippa lives with her older sister, Mina, who also has high expectations for Mina’s academic achievements, and with Mina’s husband, Jung-hwa, who is a warm and fuzzy Joe Gargery. And so on.

If reading this book would cause some middle school readers to take on Great Expectations, I’m all for it. I think Great Expectations is one of Dickens’ most accessible novels. I read it aloud to three of my children the they were about ten, eight and six years old. I’m not sure the six year old followed all of the plot and action, but she listened with the other two who did demonstrate an understanding of the basic outline and ideas of the novel. And we all enjoyed the read aloud, so I’m sure an average middle schooler could handle Dickens’ rags to riches story.

Pippa Park Raises her Game has a lot of crushing on boys, mean girls being mean, and Pippa herself being somewhat deceitful and ashamed of her family and background. If you would rather not read about any or all of these subjects, then caveat emptor. Never fear, however, good does triumph, and Pippa, like Pip, learns her lessons after much drama and turmoil brought on mostly by her own actions.

Oh, I liked the fact that Pippa listens to K-pop and watches K-dramas. These are good details in a good, solid book that reads a little bit like a K-drama.

In 1960, children’s author Mary Stolz published a book called The Dog of Barkham Street, about a boy, a dog, an undependable uncle, and a bully named Martin. Three years later the sequel to The Dog of Barkham Street, The Bully of Barkham Street, told the same story from the point of view of Martin, the villain/bully of the first story. I remember reading these two books and being made to think about how the same story can look completely different from a different point view. Author Susan Perabo writes about this recognition that everyone has his own story in a blog post at Read It Forward called What I Learned on Barkham Street.

It’s an important lesson, and not one we learn from being preached at. As Ms. Perabo says, “In the hands of a lesser writer, these books might have seemed like teaching tools instead of great stories—a ten year old can smell a life lesson a mile away.” I still have Mary Stolz’s books in my library, and they still speak powerfully to children (and adults) about understanding and character and looking at people from a different perspective. Nevertheless, there’s room in the world for more than one story like this. Finding Langston and Leaving Lymon by Lesa Cline-Ransome are two books written much in the same vein as Mary Stolz’s titles. And the two books together have the power to bring a sense of empathy and understanding to a new generation of readers.

Finding Langston tells the story of a young African American boy who moves from Alabama to Chicago with his father during what is called The Great Migration, the movement of many Black Americans from the Jim Crow South into the cities of the northern United States. Langston is a country boy, and he finds the streets and schools of the big city unfriendly and difficult to navigate. The bullying and teasing he receives from classmates, especially the mean, hostile for no reason, Lymon, is almost more than Langston can stand. Nevertheless, Langston finds solace in the library and in the poetry of Langston Hughes.

Lymon is a minor character in Finding Langston, an unrepentant bully and just another hard thing for Langston to learn to overcome or endure. But in Leaving Lymon, Lymon gets his own story. We find out why Lymon is so angry, why he doesn’t have the strength or maturity to be kind or friendly, and why Lymon and Langston can’t understand each other despite their similar backgrounds. Both boys have moved to Chicago from the South; both come from country roots,; both find some comfort in the arts, Langston in poetry and Lymon in music. But instead of sharing their stories and finding connection, both boys are trapped by their own troubled circumstances.

In spite of the difficult topics that are covered in these two novels—death, grief, abuse, bullying, abandonment—both books do have the requisite somewhat happy and hopeful ending. Langston learns to stand up for himself and to feel a connection to his dead mother. Lymon is still angry at his parents for abandoning him, but he learns to express that anger and to look to the future rather than dwelling on the unfixable past. I think Mary Stolz would like these new books on an old theme of walking a mile in the other person’s shoes.

If you’ve read any of Ally Carter’s other books in her YA series Gallagher Girls or Heist Society, you’ll know the flavor of this first book in her first middle grade series: it’s fast-paced intrigue, family secrets, and the triumph of the underdog with engaging characters who coalesce into a team of brave children determined to solve all of the mysteries and fight for justice. This isn’t a YA novel, however. No romance, but there is some rather nasty violence, with swords and knives and blood and all that jazz.

The main character is April who has been in the foster care system all her life. She sees herself as different from all of the other kids, however, because she has a solid clue that her mother is going to come back to get her soon—a key that April hangs around her neck and a promise that she barely remembers. Instead of a parental rescue, April has to be rescued from a museum fire by a stranger, and somehow she ends up in the mansion of the mysterious Gabriel Winterborne, who disappeared almost ten years ago. Is he still alive? What does April’s key have to do with the Winterbornes’ fortune? Can April claim the five million dollar reward for information leading to Gabriel’s whereabouts? And why are five orphans gathered together and given the privilege of living in the Winterborne mansion?

The tone of this novel is snarky and kind of jerky. Events happen suddenly, sometimes without enough build-up or preparation to make them understandable or even believable. April is a cynical kid with a chip on her shoulder, but of course, she really has a heart. It’s just buried beneath all the bad stuff that’s happened in her life to make her unwilling to trust anyone. And I should warn you that the ending is a little less than satisfying. It’s an ending, not a complete cliffhanger, but there are obviously more secrets to be uncovered in the next book in the series.

The best Middle Grade fiction book I’ve read that was published in 2020. Sara Pennypacker, author of Pax and the beloved Clementine books and an adult novel set in Germany during WWII that I liked very much, has hit a home run with this story. “What does it take to be a hero?” says the cover teaser. But I’m not sure that heroics are more than a minor theme in the book. I got a much different message or set of messages and inspirations.

Ware is happy spending the summer at his grandmother’s senior living apartment complex where he can mostly be left alone to dream of knights and castles and whatever else he wants to think about. Other people think he’s “zoned out” and in need of “Meaningful Social Interaction”, but Grandma, called Big Deal by the family, is good at letting Ware be Ware, not expecting him to be “normal” like his parents do. Unfortunately for Ware, his summer of dreams gets cut short, and his parents sign him up for another summer at the REC. When Ware skips out on the summer program at the REC and meets a tough and fierce gardener named Jolene in the vacant lot next door, the two children begin as enemies but soon make a truce so that they can try to work together to save Jolene’s garden and the old shell of a church that has become Ware’s castle.

I like misfit, dreamy kids. I like misfit, tough, realist kids. I like secret hideouts and hidden gardens and the growth that happens in them. I liked the pitting of a dreamer against a hardheaded realist and how neither is completely right or completely wrong about the world and the ending of the story. Jolene accuses Ware over and over again of living in “Magic Fairness Land” whereas she’s sure that the real world isn’t fair and it’s no use expecting it to be so. Ware thinks maybe Jolene is a little too much of a realist while he doubts his own tendency to be always “off in his own world” and oblivious to present circumstances. Maybe, he thinks, he should be more normal as his parent seem to want him to be, or maybe he’s right to have a a little more hope and imagination than the normal, average kid.

Jolene knew how the world worked. She was usually right. Still, he hoped she was wrong this time.

“The real world is also all the things we do about the bad stuff. We’re the real world, too.” ~Ware

“It’s like this: artists see something that moves us, we need to take it in, make it part of ourselves. And then give it back to the world, translated, in a way the world can see it, too.” ~Ware’s Uncle Cy

“Don’t ask to be normal. You’re already better than that.” ~Jolene

There’s just so much to talk about in this book and so much to think about. The story reminded me a little bit of Bridge to Terebithia by Katharine Paterson, because of the friendship and the secret spaces, but (SPOILER!) no one dies! And even if things don’t turn out exactly how Ware imagines and hopes they might, Jolene worst predictions don’t come true completely either. With the marked absence of cell phones and computers and social media and tech in general, except for a simple movie camera that Ware learns to wield, Here in the Real World gives readers a time out from that particular technology-driven real world and time to explore the world of creativity and art and imagination that the child in all of us longs for.

Erin Entrada Kelly won the Newbery Award for her middle grade novel, Hello, Universe in 2018. Unfortunately, I haven’t read Ms. Kelly’s award-winning book, but I did get a copy of her latest book, We Dream of Space. I thought it might be particularly interesting because it’s set in 1985-86, as a class and their space-loving teacher prepare for the launch of the Space Shuttle Challenger. Engineer Husband just started working at NASA in the fall of 1985, and of course, we remember the Challenger disaster quite vividly.

So, We Dream of Space features a dysfunctional family: mom and dad, and three children, Cash, Fitch, and Bird. All three siblings are in the seventh grade because Fitch and Brid are twins, and Cash is doing seventh grade for a second year after failing his classes the previous year. As the story progresses, showcasing each of the three kids in alternating chapters, the writing is good, and the characters are very real and growing. Cash is trying to find out if there’s anything that he’s actually good at doing, since basketball and schoolwork are both out. Fitch is obsessed with playing games at the video arcade and trying to hold his temper. Bird wants to become the first female space shuttle commander as well as being the one person who attempts to hold the family together as they spin out in their separate orbits.

Wow, was this book a downer! It started out with a dysfunctional family, parents that call each other (expletive deleted) names all through the book and siblings that mainly ignore one another as much as possible, and it ended with the Cash, Fitch and Bird coming through their various difficulties with a small glimmer of hope in spite of the story’s climax in which the space shuttle Challenger explodes.

When I say “small glimmer of hope” I mean small. The hope is barely there, and I’m not sure young readers will see it at all. Maybe this story would be encouraging, something of a mirror, for those children who live in dysfunctional families like the one in the book, but I tend to think escapist literature is more appealing for many children (and adults) who live in hard situations. At least, Bird has her astronaut fantasies, Fitch his video games, and Cash his Philadelphia 76ers basketball games. The reader of this sad but true to life novel won’t get much more than a glimpse of a beginning of family growth, maybe. Is Ms. Entrada’s Newbery winner as sad and discouraging as this one is? If so, maybe I’ll just skip it.