The Middle Grade Review

  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...

  "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...