The Middle Grade Review

  Theo and Reef have their own problems, and then they have each other's. Body swap stories are usually definite and immediate switches — Jamie Lee Curtis goes back to high school, Tom Hanks gets a job at a toy company, Kevin Spacey is a cat — but Gordon Korman takes a fresh approach to the genre in Mixed Up ( Scholastic , 2023). Theo and Reef are two twelve-year-old boys who find themselves unable to recall certain memories, but then can recall new memories... of a life they didn't live. Somehow, not by choice, they're trading memories to each other. Most body swap stories are about appreciating life, the one lost to the switch or one that had been lost on the way to adulthood, or coming to appreciate the person with whom you've changed places. These can be entertaining stories, but usually there's little else for the audience or reader to appreciate. The plots are pat, the messages sweeping. Not so here. Because the switch in Mixed Up  happens gradually, its vic

  Most middle grade novels focus on a pre-teen child, but War Stories by Gordon Korman (2020, Scholastic ) is not most middle grade novels. The protagonist is an old man looking back at his seventeenth year, the year he enlisted in the US Army to serve during WWII. The book isn't gruesomely detailed, but neither is it a sugarcoated account. Jacob Firestone in the present plays himself up to his great grandson Trevor as a John Wayne figure, gutsy and dauntless. Where, in Hiroshima , Laurence Yep relays blunt historical facts that shock by their uniqueness, Korman befuddles readers with a viscerally harrowing portrayal of on-the-ground combat. Here, the victims are more often soldiers than bystanders. Jacob is particularly saddening, as he's underage. I recall Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five  and its iconic alternate title, The Children's Crusade: A Duty-Dance with Death . A child, Jacob is idealistic and emotionally vulnerable, having lied to enroll out of a sense

  Victoria could think of no rougher induction into adulthood. Mere days from starting her first menstrual cycle, she must not only face the father who abandoned her to start a new family, the father who she hasn't seen in two years, but she must stay with him for the last month of her summer vacation. At least she'll have her trusty notebooks with her. R.L. Toalson 's The First Magnificent Summer (2023, Aladdin ) is the journal of a twelve-year-old who is astute, sensitive, and scarred. Her journal is her best friend and her only true confidant. She can tell no other of the torture of her father's judgment — he ridicules her weight, insists her writing is a waste of time, and (worst of all, in his eyes) compares Victoria with her mother. What's more, she vies for his approval anyway. Against her better judgment, Victoria longs for her father's attention and love, and she loves him. She can't help herself. In painful detail, Toalson captures the competing

• My Dope Intro Like a satisfying mixtape,  Shanthi Sekaran 's new novel  Boomi's Boombox   ( Katherine Tegan Books , 2023)  is emotionally and thematically eclectic. Twelve-year-old Boomi has been expelled from a ballet academy, kicked to the curb by her bestie, and fat-shamed by her own mother. Worst, her father died of Covid. Boomi is American, but her parents are (or were) British immigrants of Indian descent. A culture clash and a battle of interests are happening within Boomi, and then... then she time travels to 1986! • The Power of Love In 1986, Boomi reconnects with her father, then also twelve years old. The heart of the novel is Boomi's anguish over having lost him, which spurs her to better understand who he was as a person, more than just a father figure. To her surprise, she learns more about everyone in her family — her aunt, her grandmother... herself. She discovers racial antagonism her father endured silently. She discovers that others in her family dealt

  "Some people believe that Hiroshima is so beautiful that the Americans have decided to spare it." In sparse, gentle prose, Laurence Yep details the moment of greatest manmade destruction in history. Hiroshima ( Scholastic , 1995) is almost not a novella. Facts are provided — dates, the weight of bombs, the number of murdered innocents, names (of aircrafts and historical figures, as well as fictional characters) — but Sachi, the twelve-year-old protagonist, and her sister Riko appear on only 23 of the book's 49 pages, and they are mostly an excuse to describe the events on and surrounding the day when America first attacked Japan with an atomic weapon. Little attempt is made at characterization or plot. Truly the book is a primer on nuclear war and a call for complete disarmament. Yep is not theatrical. He needn't be: the bare facts disturb. Even the book's dialogue — "My God, what have we done?" — though haunting, is nevertheless documented historic

Joleen Michellie, founder of the independent publisher Jobooks , has penned a new novelette for grade schoolers, The Case of the Missing Tooth Fairy , that harkens back to the quieter 1990s Apple paperbacks. Don't expect any Encyclopedia Brown-type sleuthing, and no Tinkerbells zip about this cozy suburb. The magic of the story is in its details, and the mystery is one all children must eventually face. Annabelle MacShannon has lost a tooth. She's excited to trade with the tooth fairy, but she forgets to place the tooth under her pillow that night. Then, the next two nights, it appears the tooth fairy decides not to return, tooth or no tooth. Is there any righting the situation? Does the tooth fairy even exist? This very short book packs a lot of heart. Annabelle's mother negotiates the girl taking a quick shower instead of a fun bath. Kids at school debate (and tease each other about) tooth-fairy lore. The father shares funny stories at dinnertime. The whole family pitches

Lauren and Tara aren't just besties: they're the Royal We, in sync and inseparable. That is, until Tara is handed the lead in a school musical despite having zero vocal skills. Lauren should have been a shoe-in for the part—her voice is angelic—but Mrs. Tyndall, the drama teacher, wants "an all-American girl" in the role. Sure, Lauren is American, but she's also Jewish and of Chinese descent. This, Tyndall insists, would take the audience out of the story. What's worse is that Tara doesn't disagree. Not Your All-American Girl (by Madelyn Rosenberg and Wendy Wan-Long Shang ) isn't (primarily) about the overt and violent acts of prejudice that make the news, but everyday misconceptions and subtle, even misguided but well-intentioned, ways in which one might discriminate against another. Tyndall, for example, is surprised to discover that Lauren is Jewish. "Are you sure?" she asks. She doesn't intentionally insult Lauren's credibility,