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