Books In the Middle Podcast

Send us Fan Mail All the Blues in the Sky by Renee Watson Sage was looking forward to spending her 13th birthday with her best friend, until tragedy struck. When her best friend is killed, Sage struggles to have the energy to move on with her own life. How can she, after she has suffered such a profound horrible loss? And even other students in her grief group at school don't understand what...

Send us Fan Mail How the Ghost Army Hoodwinked Hitler by Rebecca Siegel This is the incredible story of how one unit was able to fool the German army during World War II and possibly help save thousands of lives. Because it was a secret army, it is hard to know their true impact, but reading this book will make you realize how there were many different fronts on which the war was fought.  Recommen...

Send us Fan Mail Gaslit by Megan Davidhiszar Ella is facing a huge medical diagnosis. She found out that the migraines she has been having that are just debilitating are not caused by stress, or diet, but by a brain tumor. Being in high school and finding out you might have a brain tumor that could kill you is not something anyone wants to hear. But Ella is trying her best to block it out and so s...

Send us Fan Mail Death in the Jungle by Candace Fleming What really happened to the people of Jonestown in Guyana, South America on the night of November 18, 1978? Were people there willingly, or had some wanted to leave but were not allowed? This book does a comprehensive dive into the personalities, the reasons and the dreams of the people who died in the jungle that day.  Recommended for mature...

Send us Fan Mail Are You Nobody Too? By Tina Cane Emily is having a terrible time fitting in to her new school. On the surface, it seems like she should be having no trouble, because she is Chinese American and her new public school has a ton of Chinese Americans, but she was adopted by white parents and didn't grow up speaking Mandarin. Leaving behind her friends at her private school has be...

Send us Fan Mail Slugfest by Gordon Korman  Yash is ready to move on from 8th grade to high school. He feels like he is pretty much there already since he has gotten to skip PE at his middle school and go play on all the JV teams at the high school...because...he...is...that...good. Period. But when his middle school principal shows up at one of his JV games, he knows something is off, but he has...

Send us Fan Mail Al Capone Does My Shirts    By Gennifer Choldenko Moose really doesn’t want to leave his home in Santa Monica to move to Alcatraz Island.  His father takes a job as a guard so the family can get Natalie, Moose’s sister, into a special school.  Even though Natalie is older than Moose she acts much younger, and the whole family has to make changes for her.  And this time, that chang...

Send us Fan Mail Soldier Boys by Dean Hughes  Both Dieter and Spence have a few things in common - both have a desire to stand up for their country and do what they think is right. Both have families that care about them going to fight in the war, and both are totally unprepared for the things they will be asked to do and see as they fight in Europe during World War II.  Support the show

Send us Fan Mail Fever 1793 by Laurie Halse Anderson Matilda, or Mattie as the cook employed by her mother calls her, is not thrilled having to do a ton of work around her family's coffee house. But when the city of Philadelphia is struck by disease that is ripping through the city, Matilda is just hoping she and her family can make it out, alive.  Recommended for grade 6 and up.  Support the...

Send us Fan Mail Follow the Water by Ellen Cochrane When Juliane is 17 years old, she falls out of an airplane almost 2 miles up...and survives! What makes this an even more amazing story, is she is able to survive her days and nights in the Amazon jungle for nearly two weeks, using all the knowledge she has learned from her parents and her time living at their scientific station as she grew up. B...

Send us Fan Mail Grenade by Alan Gratz Okinawa is a relatively small island off the southern tip of Japan, but at the end of World War II it was the place of the last and bloodiest battle of the whole Pacific Ocean war. Hideki is a native Okinawan and he and his family have been separated due to the war. Hideki has stayed behind with a bunch of other boys around his age of 14 to become part of the...

Send us Fan Mail Hi Everyone! Another year has flown by! My goodness. I hope you have enjoyed listening to my podcasts this year while I take a quick break for Spring and get more reading done. My breaks from my school are usually not a break at all, but a time to read, and catch up on doing all the many things that I need to do for work.  However, I hope all of you are able to take a moment and e...

Send us Fan Mail How to Tell a True Story by Tricia Springstubb Amber wakes up to an absolute nightmare when her house catches on fire. Her older brother, though, saves the day, by saving her life. Her brother, Gage, that her dad has been berating for the last year, because he isn't doing exactly what their dad thinks he should be doing becomes the local hero. But is what he did really heroic...

Send us Fan Mail The Color of a Lie by Kim Johnson When Calvin and his parents move to a new town in Pennsylvania, he is not pleased. It meant leaving the life he had back in Chicago, but not only that, it means he can never really BE himself...because his dad plans for the family to pass, as white. The year is 1955, and Calvin and his family are limited in where they can live, work and even eat i...

Send us Fan Mail The Right Call by Tommy Greenwald Cal is a talented pitcher - so talented that he has scouts from colleges that are interested in him and that can mean a lot of pressure - pressure on him and it turns out, on his parents. Cal just wants to focus on playing the best ball he can, but soon forces outside of his control begin to spiral in ways no one could have imagined.  Recommended...

Send us Fan Mail Murder Between Friends by Liz Lawson For years, Grace, Ally and Henry were all the best of friends, but that all changed when Grace thought she saw Henry's older brother in the backyard of one of their teacher's. A teacher who was later found dead. Jake, Henry's brother, went to prison, mostly because of the testimony of Grace. But when he gets out on a technicality...

Send us Fan Mail Will's Race for Home by Jewell Parker Rhodes For as long as he can remember, Will's father has seemed dissatisfied. Will never knows what it will take to make his father, a sharecropper in Texas, happy. Until, one day he comes back from town with a notice about a land rush that will be happening in Oklahoma the following April. Right away, everything changes when the dec...

Send us Fan Mail Very Bad at Math by Hope Larson Verity, or Very, as everyone calls her, has everything going for her in 8th grade, except for Math. Even though she is the Student Council President and has tons of great ideas and plans, she can't get out from under the issue of Math and how she can try super hard, and it just doesn't seem to make sense to her! But now, if she can't...

Send us Fan Mail Louder Than Hunger by John Schu In 8th grade, Jake finds himself lost, except for the voice in his head, that tells him things will get better if he can just make himself small enough. As in, physically small, so no one will see him and therefore, can't hurt him. He feels the only one who really sees him is his grandmother, who is becoming concerned about his weight. And when...

Send us Fan Mail The Enigma Girls by Candace Fleming Ever wonder just how everyone communicated during World War II? And all the secrets, spies, and information that could fall into the wrong hands? Who was out there intercepting all of that "chatter"? It turns out, in England there was a place that was dedicated to breaking the German's Enigma Machine that Germany was using to diss...

Send us Fan Mail Click'd by Tamara Ireland Stone Allie is sure her app, called Click'd that she developed over the summer at a coding camp could actually be a contender for winning a huge competition called Games for Good. But when a classmate shows his gaming app for the same competition to their class, Allie gets worried. Is the small sample of playing the game that she did actually en...

Send us Fan Mail Dating and Dragons by Kristy Boyce Quinn is happy to be in a new school - especially since her hold school has no good memories and unfortunately, no friends anymore. So when she gets invited to a new Dungeons and Dragons group, she is excited. And when she finds out it includes a guy named Logan, who she secretly thinks is pretty awesome, it makes everything seem better. But when...

Send us Fan Mail Stay Dead by April Henry Milan's life feels like it spiraling out of control. She and her father were in a car accident 8 months ago, and he was killed, and she was left with a leg that was severally broken - and has pins in it. But after her father's death, her mom decided to send her off to a boarding school - because her mom took over her father's US Senate seat....

Send us Fan Mail Drawing Deena by Hena Khan It is frustrating to Deena that her mom always seems to be fighting with her dad about money. It makes her worried that they might split up, and it makes her feel like she can never ask for anything - like the art classes she would love to take. She thinks if she can come up with a plan to help her mom's business make more money then perhaps that wi...

Send us Fan Mail The Bletchley Riddle by Ruta Septys and Steve Sheinkin Jakob has a job to do for his country of Britain in their time of need. It is the beginning of World War II, and he is part of a team that is working to break the Nazis Enigma code machine. What he isn't counting on is his younger sister, Lizzie, who doesn't believe that their mother was killed in Poland at the begin...