It’s been a couple of years since I put together my list of 8 Spooky Middle Grade Books, and so many great new books have come out since! Here are a few I’ve enjoyed.
If you’re in the mood for a comfortingly cozy yet witchy (and witty) story, take a look at this! I first fell in love with Sangu Mandanna’s middle grade series, Kiki Kallira, and was very excited to see her come out with her first adult title this year.
The Very Secret Society of Irregular Witches by Sangu Mandanna
Penguin Random House, 2022.
ISBN 978053439357
Read from a library copy.
It is the sad fate of all witches to be orphaned. Mika Moon, now 31, was brought to the UK from India as a child, adopted by a strict old witch named Primrose who spent more time looking for other orphaned witchlings to adopt than caring for Mika herself. Now Mika moves from short-term job to short-term job, seeing other witches only at secret quarterly meetings. Yes, Mika’s mental health has been affected by this – but she’s decided to face life with a sense of humor, by coming up with increasingly ridiculous names for their group of witches, and most recently, by starting a video channel on social media where she shares real magical potion tips that she assumes people will assume are fake.
…Until the day she receives a message, asking her to serve as a live-in tutor for three young witches. Rosetta, Terracotta, and Altamira were adopted by an older witch who, like Primrose, traveled the world searching for magical orphans. Unlike Primrose, though, Lillian also did archaeology, and has left the three girls to be raised by a devoted if non-magical staff instead of separating them, as Primrose insisted all witches must stay separated.
Mika always believed that Primrose was right, but as she gets to know the three girls, the lovely gay older couple who invited her, the housekeeper, and the obnoxiously handsome if cantankerous librarian, Jamie – she might just change her mind.
This is a delightfully witchy book about finding home, rethinking established patterns, and working through trauma, with a lot of hilarious young witch hijinks as well. I am only supposed to be reading Cybils books right now, but sped through this one despite the guilt when it finally came in after a couple of months on hold. I might need to buy my own copy for future comfort reading as well.
I’ve been seeing lots of witchy romance books coming out lately, but this is the first one of this recent crop I’ve read, though now I also want to reread Barbara Bretton’s Casting Spells, which I recall being delightful, with rather more knitting. Let me know in the comments if you have any recommendations!
Here are two books perfect for the fall season! Both of these have already been nominated for the Cybils Award this year – standard disclaimer about my opinion not reflecting that of the committee as a whole applies here.
Let the Monster Out by Chad Lucas
Abrams, 2022
ISBN 9781419751264
Read from a library copy. Ebook and audiobook on Libby.
Bones Malone has always had a hard time fitting in and behaving, and moving to tiny, mostly-white Langille, Nova Scotia (famous for the high tech company that moved its headquarters her a few years ago) hasn’t helped. The only other Black family in town is that of Coach Robeson, a former pro baseball player who’s now coaching the AAA team, and his wife and kids. Also on the team is Kyle, who’s homeschooled because of his extreme difficulty fitting in in social situations.
After an initially rocky start to the relationship, Bones and Kyle both find themselves suspicious – key adults in their lives have started acting like zombies, while Bones’s reporter mother was being blocked whenever she tried to report on the company before she went zombie. When they rescue a drowning man who begs them to keep his notebook safe, they think they might have a clue. But it’s kids against adults – both the obviously evil ones, and the ones who just want to keep them safe – as well as bullies and their own darkest fears. Let the Monster Out has some truly terrifying elements, like shared nightmares with recurring polar bear attacks and beloved adults’ personalities changing, wrapped in a fast-moving plot with a great cast of kids. At the same time, it addresses some serious issues – Bones and his family are learning to move on after leaving his abusive father and Kyle would like to learn more about what makes him different, while his parents want to avoid labeling him. This is a satisfyingly scary mystery that still addresses important and relevant topics – another winner from the author of Thanks a Lot, Universe.
Secret of the Shadow Beasts by Diane Magras
Dial Books, 2022
ISBN 978-0735229327
Read from a library copy.
12-year-old Nora, who is white, has never questioned her father’s decision to keep her at home, rather than sending her off to train to be a knight at age 7, when it was discovered that she was one of the rare children who was immune to the venom of the Umbrae. The terrifying shadow beasts rise from the ground at nightfall, with bites lethal to all adults. Her father, though, died years ago, and when Nora is able to save her mother from an Umbrae attack when they are out late one night, she calls the local office to report the attack and is quickly talked into joining the knights herself. It’s hard to leave her mother alone on their tiny farm, though, and perhaps even harder to leave her best friend Wilfred, who is Black, and with whom she spends all her free time playing an epic fantasy video game.
Once at the castle of Noye’s Hill, though, Nora starts to wonder what she’s signed up for. She does terrifyingly well on the entrance tests, and is expected to join a tightly-knit order of knights and head out to battle Umbrae with only a week of training. Playing video games may have given her very quick reaction times, but it doesn’t prepare her emotionally, nor does it endear her to the older members of her order, some of whom very much resent having such a newbie replace the beloved member Nora is replacing. And no matter how hard they fight, the Umbrae keep multiplying, with fewer and fewer knights to fight them. Here, Nora’s inexperience may be her best weapon, as she asks questions that those raised within the system haven’t asked, questions that may also partly explain why she came in at such a high skill level.
Nora’s order is filled with a diverse array of people, including a trans girl and people whose ancestry would translate to South Asian (and the delicious foods of those cultures) and African. Despite the grimness of the battles (which, fine, will probably be a selling point for many readers), there is also lots of warmth here, from the lilt of Nora’s traditional fiddle tunes and ugly-cute knitting to the excitement of both the video games and the video game-like reality that is being a knight, as well as the close bonds of her Order as they relax together between battles. Give this to any kid who loves battling monsters and tales of tight-knit teams.
Every year, as the Cybils nomination period draws to a close, I wait in anxious suspense, hoping that all of my favorites from the past year will be nominated – or at least, all but one, so that I can nominate that final title myself. Nominations close on October 15th, and so far there are many, many titles that are missing. These are just the ones I’ve read myself, but there are many other good ones that I would like to read and am still hoping will be nominated.
If you haven’t nominated anything yet yourself, read through this list (or look through your own reading list from the past year) and see what you might feel motivated to nominate. Remember, nominating a book doesn’t mean you think it’s the best book you’ve ever read or the very best to come out this year, but that it is a solid title that you think deserves to be given a read-through by the round 1 panelists.
I’m giving you the logo because I don’t have time to put in 23 book covers.
It’s Cybils nominating season! As you will know if you’ve been reading here for a while, the Cybils nominations are a crowd-sourced effort – and each member of the crowd can nominate only one book in each category. That means that we need lots of people participating to make sure that every worthy book gets nominated! Plus, I can say from personal experience that it is very satisfying indeed to look at the finalist lists on January 1 and see that a book that you nominated made it to the shortlist.
Many years, I put together lists of worthy contenders that haven’t yet been nominated. I may get there yet, but for now, I am starting with trying to catch up with reviewing eligible books. If you are looking for ideas of books to nominate, you can also look at the Cybils Padlet.
The Prince of Nowhere by Rochelle Hassan. HarperCollins, 2022. ISBN 9780063054608. Read from library copy.
Roda’s ordinary life with her mother and Aunt Dora is drawn into mystery as she starts finding notes from Anonymous filled with riddles for her to answer about Nowhere. The first of these leads her to rescue a crow, injured from flying through the magical mist barrier that protects her city from the wild lands outside. The crow – definitely more than just a crow – and further notes lead Roda to venture outside the mist for the first time ever. There, she learns more about the legacy of the great Aurelion Kader, whose research led to the creation of the mist, and meets a mysterious and deeply suspicious person who wants to be known as the Traveler.
The plot is so twisty and full of surprises that it’s difficult to say much more about it without giving away key things. But with riddles, time travel, dragons, automata with personalities, and the last survivors of fallen cities, as well as a great central friendship, this is a truly unique book that I keep thinking about months after I read it.
The Lock-Eater by Zack Loran Clark. Dial Books, 2022 ISBN 978-1984816887 Read from library copy. Ebook and audiobook available on Libby.
Melanie Gate has grown up at the Merrytrails Orphanage for Girls, a home filled with a diverse population, all cared for by the elderly Mrs. Harbargain, who does her best despite the lack of resources. Melanie’s best friend, Jane Alley, is a quiet contrast to Melanie who possesses a truly impressive imagination. Only Mrs. Harbargain has anything kind to say about the mean-tempered cat, Abraxas, who torments the little girls. Melanie wishes she knew anything about her past, and has to keep her power to open locks hidden, as the Thaumaturgy frowns on anyone not part of the government using magic.
This familiar life changes abruptly when a six-foot-tall copper gearling called Traveler recruits her – he says to be apprentice to a witch in the nearby woods. But Traveler is not what he seems, and leads Melanie on an adventure that will help unravel the mysteries of her own past as well as those behind Traveler. which in turn uncovers secrets that will rock the very foundations of the Thaumaturgy. (As the Thaumaturgic Empire has a banner with three red eyes on it, besides preventing innocent girls from using their magic, it’s pretty clear from the beginning that the empire is not the utopia it makes itself out to be.)
On the way, Melanie meets captive griffins, develops a first crush on a young tailor/seamstress named Livia, learns of the fearsome Ley Coven, and finds a new path for her companions at the orphanage. This was one I enjoyed so much that I couldn’t stop reading and didn’t want it to end.
I loved Eva Evergreenenough to buy it on audiobook and listen again with my daughter, so I was eagerly awaiting this origin story of Eva’s mother’s best friend, Queen Alliana. It is eligible to be nominated for the Cybils Awards, so if you read and loved it, keep an eye out for nominations, which open as always on October 1.
Alliana, Girl of Dragons by Julie Abe
Little Brown, 2022
ISBN 9780316300353
Read from a library copy. Also available as an ebook through Libby.
Here, we are introduced to the future queen when she’s an abused orphan working in her stepmother’s inn. This is told as a Cinderella story – Alliana remembers her time learning about herbs near the magical Rift from her father fondly, as well as the inn’s coziness before her father vanished into the Rift and her stepmother took over the inn. Now the only person at home who cares for her is her step-grandmother, Mari, who keeps to herself in the attic and doesn’t know how poorly Alliana is treated.
Alliana and her best friend, baker’s boy Isao, dream of escape to someplace beyond their dusty backwater town, but neither sees a way of escape. Isao would need a proper apprenticeship – difficult when he cares for his younger brother as well – while Alliana’s stepmother holds ever-growing debt over her head. Alliana’s best chance of escape is going to the nearby landowner’s annual ball for kids coming of age, where she would be tested for her ability to go to the Royal Academy. But she knows her stepmother will do everything in her power to keep Alliana and her free labor at the inn.
Then, two things happen that begin, slowly, to reduce her stepmother’s hold on her. As she’s picking herbs near the Rift one day, she sees a gap in the magical barrier that keeps the creatures from the depths away from the human realm, and a small baby dragon under attack near it. When she saves it, she earns its enduring devotion – and discovers that she has the long-lost ability to hear it communicating with her.
Next, she meets a young apprentice witch her own age, Nela Evergreen, who quickly becomes friends with her (as well as falling hard for Isao’s baking.) With help from Isao, Nela, and her dragon, she just might find her way to the ball and away from her cruel stepfamily.
While I love this world and loved reading about her time with Grandmother Mari, Isao, Nela, and the dragon, most of Alliana’s time is tainted by her stepfamily’s deliberate cruelty – working her so hard she doesn’t have time to sleep, depriving her of proper food, and stealing or breaking her few possessions. Her journey to freedom is more straight up the side of the Rift than uphill, and I was definitely cheering for her by the time she got there.
I always love this reading, and I’m excited to work with several people I haven’t worked with before, as well as our fearless leader Charlotte of Charlotte’s Library. I have been following Jenna of Falling Letters and Leila of Bookshelves of Doom for a long time, and am looking forward to getting to know Jolyn Asato, too.
This announcement means it’s almost October, and time to start putting together your ideas for books to nominate! (I’ll be working on that myself.) Nominations open up October 1, and you’ll have two weeks to nominate your favorite book of the past year in each of the categories.
This freshly imagined story of an immigrant girl, taking off from the author’s grandmother’s story, is filled with determination, hard-won joy, as well as hope and humor.
The Other Side of the River by Alda P. Dobbs
Sourcebooks Young Readers, 2022
ISBN 9781728238449
Review copy kindly sent by the author.
InThe Barefoot Dreams of Petra Luna, Petra went from one challenge to another in her epic journey leading her abuelita, little sister Amelia, and baby brother Luisito through the war-torn revolutionary Mexico of 1913 to the safety of the United States. Now, they’re refugees in a disease-riddled camp in Texas. Petra’s mission is to find a job that will pay enough that her family can find more permanent housing of their own, while still searching for news of her missing father and cousin. But jobs are in short supply in general, and even worse for a twelve-year-old girl looking for pay high enough to support a family. Their journey continues from the refugee camp to colorful San Antonio.
Yet even as Petra works her hardest to improve her family’s situation, she’s getting mixed messages from the world around them. They’re provided with great food in the refugee camp, for example, but none of the people there to offer jobs want to hire Petra. She’s still told far too often that wanting to read is dreaming far above her station and will only lead to heartbreak. And once in San Antonio, many people look down on her even more than they did in Mexico. Still, despite the prejudice, there are genuinely kind people who want to help, like the nun who gives her her first pair of shoes and starts teaching her to read, and it’s part of Petra’s challenge to learn to tell them apart from those who only want to take advantage of her. As always, she carries the lump of coal that her father gave to her before they were separated, a reminder that it takes pressure to turn coal into a diamond.
Readers will want to start with Barefoot Dreams, but the break between books is sharp enough and there’s enough context given that I think they’ll be able to start here if they can’t read the books in order for whatever reason. Petra is filled with so much heart, her passion leading to enough mistakes for her journey to feel authentic. Sentences are straightforward yet limpid and poetic, somehow carrying the feeling of expressive writing that still feels like it could easily be translated back into Spanish. (Not that translating is easy!) Barefoot Dreams justly won honors, and I hope that The Other Side of the River wins similar acclaim.
As I mentioned earlier this week, I’m always excited for a good magical school story, and I’ve been so excited to see how many of them have been coming out this year, especially starring Black girls. You can take your pick between a school set in historic manor in Louisiana and one set at a futuristic school in Nigeria.
Wildseed Witch by Marti Dumas. Abrams, 2022. ISBN 978-1419755613. Read from library copy. New Orleans middle schooler Hassani has two main goals: to make it as a YouTuber with her channel “Makeup on the CheapCheap” to get her separated parents to reunite. So when her father takes her to meet his new partner, Sandy, after they’ve already bought a house together, Hassani is outraged. This leads to something that she only realizes is an outburst of magic after she is invited to attend Belles Demoiselles, a six-week-long magic academy/finishing school.
Of course Hassani is thrilled to go, but once there, finds the school filled with girls who’ve been practicing their magic for years and all have clothing and room decor to match their “signature flowers,” and look down on Hassani and her dollar store YouTube channel. The rules are unclear but the punishments are strict, leaving Hassani to wonder if she’s in the right place after all. But with a good deal of effort, she does learn more about her powers and her flaws, makes some friends – and perhaps most importantly to the child reader, learns to use her powers to attract adorable kittens.
I was a bit torn about this book. On the one hand, it’s grounded in Black New Orleans history with all-Black characters at the school, while Hassani’s best friend at home is Latina. I also liked that Hassani was able to recognize and address her own biases and work to fix problems she’s caused other people. On the other hand, this magic school had an emphasis on traditionally feminine etiquette that did not appeal to me at all. And the teachers didn’t seem to realize until almost the end of the book that they were punishing Hassani for not meeting expectations they’d never clarified to her, which seemed unnecessarily unkind. That being said, between the magic, the relatable friend and family dynamics, the quest for YouTube stardom, and of course, the kittens, I could see a lot of kids really enjoying this book.
Onyeka and the Academy of the Sun by Tọlá Okogwu. Read by Nneka Okogwu. Margaret K. McElderry Books, 2022. ISBN 9781665912617. Listened to audiobook on Libby. Onyeka and her mother have always just scraped by, moving from one cheap apartment to another. She’s never met her father, and her mother has never told her anything about him or why they moved to London from Nigeria. Onyeka’s always wondered, especially because her big, wild hair seems to set people in England on edge. But when her hair saves her best friend from drowning, she finally learns the truth: she is Solari, and called to go to a state-run school in Nigeria to learn how to use her powers. In this near-future story, Nigeria leads the world in technology, and the students have lots of high-tech help in their missions. defending the school from the Rogues. Onyeka makes friends and finds community, but also learns that not all is as it seems at the school that at first feels like a dream come true.
This is a fast-paced thriller of a story, with lots of good things going for it, including Onyeka, mysteries and plot twists (though the plot twist seemed fairly obvious to me, it probably wouldn’t to a younger reader.) I really enjoyed watching (or listening to) Onyeka learn to use her powers, and the audiobook version let me hear the accents in all their glory, from London to Lagos. My biggest problem is that while I wanted it to be empowering for the unruly Black hair to have actual magic powers, using the powers made her sick as a matter of course, and that undermined a lot of the Black hair positivity for me. Still, this is a valuable addition to the magical school roster.
This has been a great summer to find out about new magical schools! This latest book set in a magical school comes out August 30, just in time for the start of mundane schools. It’s by author J. Elle, bestselling author of the YA book Wings of Ebony, making her middle grade debut. Welcome to the middle grade club, J. Elle!
A Taste of Magic by J. Elle
Bloomsbury, 2022.
ISBN 978-1547606719
Review copy kindly sent by the publisher.
It’s Kyana’s twelfth birthday, and even though her Momma can’t afford either to buy her a gift or take time off of her jobs to spend with her, Kyana is excited that she might finally learn the family secret. This manifests itself almost immediately in the form of tingling fingers as she’s faced with a cafeteria tray of green mush – and just as quickly, whatever it is starts coming between Kyana and her best friend Nae. First Kyana is distracted from the birthday gift Nae is giving her by the tingling. Then, as Kyana finds out that she a) has magic; b) must keep it a secret; and c) has to spend all day every Saturday in magic class, things get even more challenging. She’s never had to keep secrets from Nae before, and it’s even worse when the magic classes have her making excuses for missing planned times with Nae.
Meanwhile, Kyana has plenty to keep her busy at home, as she takes care of and learns from Memaw, who’s teaching her cooking and baking despite her developing dementia. And it turns out that her her neighborhood magic school, Park Row Magic Academy, is right in the back of her hair stylist Ms. Moesha’s beauty shop. Even though she comes from a magical family, as her mother and grandmother don’t use it, she feels very behind in a class full of kids who’ve known about magic since they were small. Not only is there the social scene to manage – making friends with quiet, homeschooled Ash, and trying to take on stuck-up Russ, who also goes to her regular school and has been openly mean to Nae. There’s also a very tight timeline to figure out her magical specialty – readers will probably figure out sooner that Kyana does that it’s related to her skills in the kitchen – and to pick a community service project that will showcase her magical abilities. But how will she do that, when she’s just learning about her own magic and the magical community itself?
Then, the Park Row Magic Academy itself is threatened with closing due to lack of funding – and that would mean that all the inner city kids who go there would either have to find transportation and tuition fees to go the schools in more upscale neighborhoods or give up their magic. Now Kyana has a real mission, one that will require her to learn everything she can about her own magic and the magical community at large, as well as draw on the strengths of her family and friends.
The Park Row Magic Academy and the neighborhood magic community is lovingly grounded in African-American culture, highlighting the importance of the beauty and barber shops and other local institutions. I really liked both that there are multiple magic academies in the city, and that adults with magical abilities are found throughout the community in many different jobs. There’s plenty of humor in the spells, the magic robes, which appear when a wig or snapback cap are put on instead of needing to be carried around, Kyana’s initial magical mishaps, the ferrets who come door to door to ferret out (sorry, I couldn’t help it) magical law-breaking, and the opinionated spirits magically attached to objects. This, combined with the ever-complicated middle school social scene and lots of delicious baking makes for a story that will draw readers in with magic, humor, and relatability.
I still have a couple more new magical school books that I’m hoping to review for you soon, but if this is a category you love, try also:
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