The Middle Grade Review

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,...

May is Jewish American Heritage Month . In 1988, Jane Yolen wrote The Devils Arithmetic , a middle grade novel with a dark focus: the Shoah, the Holocaust. This book won a National Jewish Book Award , the most prestigious prize for Jewish literature in North America, and last year Yolen was presented the Body-of-Work award by the Association of Jewish Libraries . Arithmetic is widely considered her greatest achievement. 12-year-old Hannah from Rochester is bored with Judaism. The Torah is read yearly and there's the annual cycle of holidays... Her family makes the same conversations at every gathering and they retell the same old memories... Like repeating a word over and over and over till it loses meaning, these traditions have lost their meaning for Hannah. She has even shown an interest in her Catholic bestie's holidays, and one year Hannah scribbled in pen a number across her arm to mock her grandfather, a Shoah survivor. But at this year's Passover, Hannah is a bat ...

Those Kids From Fawn Creek (by Erin Entrada Kelly ) is just the book I needed to kick off my summer! What a joy! Orchid is new in town, and far from fitting in. Fawn Creek is tiny (only twelve kids make up the entire seventh grade class) and bland, bland, bland... till Orchid arrives. She doesn't fit in, and that's a good thing. She's worldly, she's carefree, and she's a complete mystery that every ordinary kid wants to solve. The titular kids are complex characters wrestling with the drama and mysteries of adolescence, but Kelly doesn't sacrifice humor and joy to tell a grown-up story about childhood. The novel is so much fun and ultimately uplifting, but not thanks to artificial, easy answers. Feelings get hurt, safety is risked, and truth—real world truth—is revealed. The Orchid and Greyson characters are especially recognizable to me—as real people I knew and that I was growing up. Savvy readers will suspect that Orchid isn't as perfect as she present...