#MiddleGradeMay Wrap Up

It's been a blast concentrating on reading middle grade books this month. Now that I'm not a youth specialist anymore, it's easy to let that reading slip as I'm concentrating on building up my skills in other areas of collection development and reader's advisory. I read some great books this month and had a lot of fun recording some video booktalks to highlight books to go along with Akoss's weekly themes.

I read a lot of the books from the TBR pile that I started with, but not all of them. And I ended up picking up some other titles as I was inspired to throughout the month. I did a lot of reviewing, as you may have noticed, and it was great to get back in the habit of writing in depth about what I'm reading.

Here are the middle grade books I read this month (some pictured above):

• All Summer Long by Hope Larson (Farrar, Straus, & Giroux, 2018)
• Be Prepared by Vera Brosgol (First Second, 2018)
• Blackbird Fly by Erin Entrada Kelly (Greenwillow, 2015)
• Bob by Wendy Mass and Rebecca Stead (Feiwel and Friends, 2018)
• The Epic Fail of Arturo Zamora by Pablo Cartaya (Viking, 2017)
• Front Desk by Kelly Yang (Scholastic, 2018)
• Ghost Boys by Jewell Parker Rhodes (Little, Brown, 2018)
• Ivy Aberdeen's Letter to the World by Ashley Herring Blake (Little, Brown 2018)
• The Journey of Little Charlie by Christopher Paul Curtis (Scholastic, 2018)
• Library on Wheels: Mary Lemist Titcomb and America's First Bookmobile by Sharlee Glen (Abrams, 2018)
• The Parker Inheritance by Varian Johnson (Scholastic, 2018)
• Path to the Stars: My Journey from Girl Scout to Rocket Scientist by Sylvia Acevedo (Clarion, September 2018)
• The Serpent's Secret by Sayantani DasGupta (Scholastic, 2018)
• You Go First by Erin Entrada Kelly (Greenwillow, 2018)

And speaking of middle grade... are you following Heavy Medal, SLJ's Mock Newbery blog? Usually they are quiet this time of year and pick up the discussion in the fall as we approach award season, but this year they're compiling suggestions of titles just like the actual committees do. I LOVE this not only because it gives a greater feel of what being on the actual committee is like, but because it gives all of us a head's up on what books we might want to pay attention to because they're getting award buzz. 

Each month, anyone can submit up to 4 suggestions of already-published eligible books and the Heavy Medal bloggers are compiling the suggestions, grouped by number of suggestions. So if you're wondering what middle grade to check out this year, books with multiple suggestions on their lists are good bets to be books people will be talking about. This is a great resource for collection development, too!