The human heroes and heroines of middle-grade novels are learning life, untangling their options, looking out for themselves as others peer in on them. The world in all its loveliness, all its sadness, all its promise and its heartbreak lies near, is felt, is seen. The mild annoyances and hammering cruelties of teendom stretch just beyond, ahead. Dilemmas aren’t calcified issues — yet. There are dark alleys, but look at all those doors.
Recent middle-grade novels have given us a future president, a Chilean refugee, and a brother and sister rooted out of their home. They’ve given us Auggie Pullman, living with a craniofacial difference; jellyfish-obsessed Suzy Swanson, who, mourning a lost friend, has decided not to speak; and a Danish child named Bettina Larsen, who is regular-size on most any day, except when she shrinks to the proportions of a nisse. Bright, bold, compassionate, quick-thinking, there’s not one of these wildly divergent and big-hearted characters I wouldn’t have wanted to raise as my own.
But as I sit among my towers of newly read and re-read middle grade novels, I’m thinking not of the young, but of the old(er). I’m contemplating the adult right-meaning guidance and essential tenderness that erupts when children are portrayed as what they (and all of us) actually are — which is to say, members of multigenerational communities. We don’t go it alone, as many teens seem to do in young-adult novels. We’re in this together. We teach, defend, raise up each other. Middle-grade novels (the best of them) speak this truth loudest of all.
Let’s return to Auggie Pullman, that brilliantly complex star of R.J. Polacio’s best-seller “Wonder.” Auggie doesn’t just live with a rare genetic deformity. He lives in a world in which his appearance elicits shock, sometimes disgust, at best not-actually-benign avoidance. He’s at school now for the first time. He’s about to lose his dog. Kids aren’t always kind. There will be bruises, setbacks, betrayals, all of which is the stuff of story.
But what makes “Wonder” so ultimately wonderful is the care with which Polacio has drawn Auggie’s parents, his older sister and her boyfriend, his precept-delivering teacher, and the principal of his new school. A middle-grader may be this book’s protagonist. But it’s Polacio’s depiction of the older others — how they stand back, when they step in, what they say, how they defend the idea of being “kinder than necessary” — that gives the book its enduring fiber and renders it an instant classic.
The marionette-building, PTSD- afflicted Vola in Sara Pennypacker’s best-selling “Pax” turns out to be the central, grounding character in this story about a boy whose father has gone off to war and the pet fox the boy has been required to release into the wild. Peter, the fox’s human friend, has traveled deep into a darkening woods to search for the fox he should have defended. Vola, a loner living on her grandfather’s isolated farm, finds Peter hurt and scared. Vola doesn’t seem, at first, to be the friendliest sort, and she keeps getting in the way of Peter’s rescue mission. But in time Vola teaches Peter not just self-reliance but responsibility. She teaches Peter that it is within a kid’s power to pivot and help those who have helped you.
In “Winterfrost,” Michelle Houts sends her 12-year-old Bettina Larsen out into another woods in search of a lost baby sister; it’s a journey that places Bettina on a path to meet an older forest dweller — an ancient nisse, or sprite — who teaches the urgent need to take responsibility for one’s own mistakes. In Ann M. Martin’s “Rain Reign,” Rose Howard, the homonym-genius 12-year-old with Asperger’s, accepts herself for who she is not just because she finds the courage to do a right, hard thing, but because she can sit in appreciating silence with her companionable Uncle Weldon — because he makes room for her.
In Cynthia Kadohata’s National Book Award-winning “The Thing About Luck,” lessons about the redemptive, bad-luck-busting power of hard work would never be learned by 12-year-old Summer without the help of a pair of crotchety Japanese grandparents or a combine-driving trucker named Mick. In Ali Benjamin’s “The Thing About Jellyfish,” it’s the teacher who gets the mute girl, Suzy, speaking again — not by insisting, but by paying close attention to who this child is and wishes to be. In Rita Williams-Garcia’s “One Crazy Summer,” it’s the long-absent mother who in the end delivers the book’s most fundamental moment: “Be eleven, Delphine. Be eleven while you can.”
Finally, where would Melody, the star of Sharon M. Draper’s “Out of My Mind,” be without her 6-foot-tall next-door neighbor, Mrs. Violet Valencia, who looks past the child’s “tornado explosions” and her multiple disabilities to insist that the child apply her long-unspoken intelligence to living as fiercely as she can?
From the very beginning Mrs. Valencia gave me no sympathy. Instead of sitting me in the special little chair my parents had bought for me, she plopped me on my back in the middle of the floor on a large, soft quilt. The first time she did that, I looked up at her like she was crazy. I cried. I screeched. She ignored me, walked away, and flipped on her CD player. Loud marching band music blared through the room. I liked it.
Middle-graders may be the stars of books that are written for and marketed to middle-grade readers. Middle-graders may see themselves as the stars of their own lives. But the adults who write for these readers, their parents, their teachers, their librarians, and, yes, all the rest of us, understand not just that we never grow up all by ourselves, but that we never actually stop growing up. They understand, too, that our lives — and so our stories — are far more interesting, meaningful and everlasting, when we acknowledge the adorning, provocative and refining exchange between the old(er) and the young.
Beth Kephart is the author of 21 books, including, most recently, the Jersey Shore storm story, “This Is the Story of You.”
Related reading:
“The Thing About Jellyfish” by Ali Benjamin (2015)
“Out of My Mind” by Sharon M. Draper (2010)
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“Winterfrost” by Michelle Houts (2014)
“The Thing About Luck” by Cynthia Kadohata (2013)
“Rain Reign” by Ann M. Martin (2014)
“Pax” by Sara Pennypacker (2016)
“Wonder” by R.J. Polacio (2012)
“One Crazy Summer” by Rita Williams-Garcia (2010)