Every December, the librarians of Twitter tweet out their favourite reads with the hashtag #libfaves17. Here are my picks for top middle-grade reads of 2017.
Patina is her mother’s legs. She runs because her mother cannot. Diabetes has taken her mother’s mobility and Patina is sent to live with her aunt and uncle and attend a fancy new school. She can escape all of these worries on the track. When she runs, it is just her — until that changes, too. After a disastrous track meet, Patina’s coach decides that she will be running relay. Initially furious, she learns that standing alone doesn’t make you as strong and that leaning on other takes real strength. Patina is another winner from the uber-talented Jason Reynolds
Amina sees everything around her changing. She has just started middle school and her best friend, Soojin, has a new friend, Emily. All of a sudden, Soojin wants to change her name to something more “American.” Is Amina “American” enough? When her uncle comes to stay with her family all the way from Pakistan, he convinces her parents that Amina should join a Qur’an-reciting competition. Even though she loves to sing, she has never been able to say two words in front of an audience without feeling faint. All of these questions come to a head when her mosque is vandalized. Amina’s Voice by Hena Khan is a sweet, gentle book about being true to yourself.
Scary stories are hot with the middle-grade age group and there has been a crop of fantastically chilling reads this year. Thornhill by Pam Smy is a standout combination of graphic novel and text in the vein of the Invention of Hugo Cabret. It tells the parallel and intersecting stories of two lonely girls whose fates are linked with a creepy, abandoned orphanage and their love of making life-like dolls. Their lives — and afterlives — unfold together with bone-chilling illustrations and increasingly desperate diary entries.
When Harper Raine wakes up in the hospital with no memory of how she ended up there, instead of being upset, her parents are thrilled. They quickly whisk her and her brother away to a new town. Harper enjoys exploring the creaky old house her parents have chosen until strange things start to happen. There are cold spots in certain rooms, areas where your blood runs cold and a sensation of being watched washed over you. And then there is her brother’s new imaginary friend, a friend that tells her sweet baby brother to do bad things — to hurt people. Harper will need to remember to save her entire family in Spirit Hunters by Ellen Oh.
If you were to ask Aven Green how she lost her arms, she would probably tell you that she met with misfortune in an alligator-wrestling match or saving orphans from a burning building. But the reality is much more boring: She was born without arms. Her adoptive parents become the owners of Stagecoach Pass, a down-on-its-luck old-timey western theme park in the middle of dried-out Arizona. Which seems like a fate worse than death until Aven and her new friend, Connor, discover a locked-away secret room that seems to be tied to Aven’s past. Insignificant Events in the Life of a Cactus by Dusti Bowling is a caustically funny mystery with unforgettable characters.
Find these and other great #libfaves17 at your local library.
A Good Read is a column by Tri-City librarians that is published on Wednesdays. Corene Maret Brown works at Port Moody Public Library.
