Each year, Cracking the Cover compiles a list of books that make great gifts. These are middle grade books from 2024.
Browsing: ages 9 & up
The Adventurer’s Guide to Dragonwatch, by Brandon Mull and Brandon Dorman, takes fans of the series deep inside the world they’ve come to love.
A soccer player is forced to rethink everything she knows about the sport in The Beautiful Game, by Yamile Saied Méndez.
The following books for middle readers are great options leading up to Halloween.
A girl learns that the real world is not as perfect as the stories she’s grown up with in Library Girl, a middle-grade novel by Polly Horvath.
A girl earns her place — sort of — at Air Academy only to find nothing is quite as it seems in Clara Poole and the Wrong Way Up, by Taylor Tyng.
A girl struggles to find the magic lost when a hurricane forces her away from her home in Murray Out of Water, by Taylor Tracy.
A 12-year-old tries to lift their dad’s spirits with a trip to his childhood home in Puzzleheart, a middle-grade novel by Jenn Reese.
A Jewish girl finds herself hiding in a French Catholic boarding school during WWII in The Night War, by Kimberly Brubaker Bradley.
A girl’s goal to write a fantasy novel triggers writer’s block and anxiety in Unstuck, a new middle-grade book by Barbara Dee.