The biggest challenge in children's books has to be writing an involving middle grade novel. Consider these challenges. Seven to ten-year-olds, just out of picture books, lack print and ife experience. As with all good fiction, these novels should have conflict, but nothing too intense. Middle grade books require a certain amount of predictability to help these young readers feel secure, but you don't want to be banal and boring. And you've got to pull this off with short page counts and readable vocabulary.
Add to these demands, the difficulty of describing history and you've got a much harder mission. How do you give a meaningful view of history through the eyes of an engaging character and soft pedal dismal parts? Several recent novels show how authors succeed!
Lynn Rubright's Mama's Window (Lee and Low, $16.95, ages 8-10) is loosely based on a boyhood experience of Rev. Owen Whitfield who was raised in the Mississippi Delta in the early 1900's. Protaganist "Sugar" Martin's mother dies and he's sent to live with his Uncle Fred who's grouchy, uncommunicative, crippled from a train accident and lives in a scary place, on the edge of a swamp in the Mississippi Delta where "roots reach like wooden tentacles down into the black water". Sugar puts up with poling into town and enduring teasing by a former best friend, but he reaches a breaking point when he learns that his mother's legacy- a glorious stained glass window for the new Sweet Kingdom Church-- has been traded in for a load of bricks to make the building sturdy.In seventy-nine pages, Rubright does an amazing job of balancing historical detail and sensory details, feelings, adventure, growth and a resolution just right for younger readers.
Pre- WW II Hungary is the setting for Andrea Cheng's The Lace Dowry (Front Street, $16.95, ages 9-11). Heroine twelve-year-old Juli is bookish and bright. She is not at all interested in boys and can't imagine marriage, but her mother, rasied in country poverty, is determined to travel to Halas to have a beautiful lace tablecloth commissioned for Juli's dowry. Her mother's amazed by the artistry, but Juli cares much more about new barn kittens and Roza, the young farm girl who learns lace-making instead of school subjects so that she can save her mother from fast-arriving blindness. Cheng's book works because she gives enough details to weave together a strong sense of time, setting and culture while keeping firmly in the perspective of her young innocent heroine....all this in 114 pages!
In 135 pages, Dorothy Carter's Grandma's General Store: The Ark Allen (FSG, $16.00, ages 8-10) does a remarkable job of introducing us to a warm, loving family caught in difficulties of the Depression era. Pearl is five and Prince is seven when the story opens. They dash happily between the comfort of their loving home and the fun and learning provided by their wise and nurturing grandmother in her home and general store. Then troubles floods the family when their father loses his job at the saw mill and becomes so sullen and angry that only moving north to find work and self-respect will heal him. The children are left to live with their grandmother who fends off hurricanes and the KKK with equal measures of strength and calm. The author's genius comes in delivering homespun truths that reside in stories and balancing a child-like perspective while revealing events that terrify adults.
Margaret "Meggie" Dillon, introduced in Patricia Giff's Newbery Honor book Lily's Crossing, is the heroine of Willow Run (Wendy Lamb Books, $15.95, ages 9-11). In a powerful opening, Meggie wipes a red swastika from the window of her German-born grandfather's home before he can discover it. In this gesture, we see her love for her grandfather, their close bond and understand that in this era a loyal American could suffer unwarranted consequences because of his birthplace. All these elements gain strength when Meggie and her parents move to Willow Run, Michigan so her father can work on airplanes to help the war effort. Everyone in the family faces transitions, misses roots and worries about Meggie's brother fighting overseas. Meggie's concerned with friendships and how her own prejudices help her justify doing something she knows is wrong. By keeping Meggie's struggles in the foreground, Giff gives younger novel enthusiasts a realistic picture of what it felt like to live in the U.S. during WW II.
The sixties is the setting for K.L. Going's The Liberation of Gabriel King (Putnam, $15.99, ages 9-11). Gabriel King is afraid of everything-spiders, cows...and mostly about going to fifth grade where he'll have to face bullies who have promised to torture him. Luckily he has a brave friend Frita Wilson, the only black child in his class. She decides that they will spend the summer facing down fears, but Gabe can't imagine that his bright, funny wonderful friend would ever lack courage. His awareness changes on the day that a grown man, the father of the very bully Gabe fears, whispers something in her ear at the 4th of July parade. It's then he learns that when Frita was a baby her father stood up to the KKK, facing death to make his family safe. And now when a certain member of the still active KKK threatens her, Frita fades into fear. Where is courage to be found in a small Georgia town in 1976? Maybe Gabe has more courage than he knows, or maybe he cares so deeply, he can get beyond his fears. Gabe's innocence and Frita's delivery of information make history personal and understandable.
Here is a list of genre-related books to please 7-10 year olds
Julia Donaldson, The Giants and the Joneses (Holt, $14.95)
Heather Dyer, The Girl with A Broken Wing by Heather Dyer (Scholastic, $15.99)
Vivian Vande Velde, Three Good Deeds (HBJ, $16.00)
Lauren Child, Clarice Bean Spells Trouble (Candlewick, $15.99)
Sally Warner, Not-so-Weird Emma (Viking, $14.99)
Susan Wojciechowski, Beany and the Meany (Candlewick, $15.99)
M.T. Anderson, Whales on Stilts! (Harcourt, $15.00)
Candace Fleming, Lowji Discovers America (Atheneum, $15.95)
Lois Lowry, Gooney Bird and The Room Mother (Houghton, $15.00)