Danika Dinsmore

Author / Educator / Activist

middle grade literature

Middle Grade Slipstream: When You Reach Me

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Now that the Middle Grade Monday bloggers have inspired me, plus the fact that I just finished the lovely middle grade book When You Reach Me, I decided to do another middle grade post.

I’m sure you know of this award-winning, best-selling children’s book by Rebecca Stead. I would recommend it for kids ages 10-12. It had some challenging elements for younger readers, but captures so well how the world looks to a 12-year old.

When You Reach Me takes place in New York during the late 70’s. It’s about a young girl, Miranda Sinclair, who begins to receive mysterious notes from someone who appears to have knowledge of future events. In addition, her best friend Sal has suddenly stopped being friends with her and she doesn’t know why. In the background of all of this, her mother is about to appear on The 20,000 Pyramid show. (remember that show?)

My focus as a writer/teacher is MG/YA speculative fiction, which as we all know has exploded in popularity in the past decade. I think we owe a great deal to J.K. Rowling for this. No longer are there simply the three main speculative fiction categories (Sci Fi, Fantasy, and Horror). There are dozens of subgenres and more being invented through a fusion of elements and due to our strange modern times. (See a fabulous subgenre list by Marg Gilks HERE).

The “slipstream” subgenre isn’t as well known as some and I think When You Reach Me is a fabulous example of it.

Slipstream is defined as a cross between light science fiction or fantasy and mainstream (non-genre) fiction. It deals with real world issues, so can be categorized as mainstream, but it’s life a bit fantastic, a bit surreal.

When You Reach Me deals with such things as poverty, racism, single parenthood, and injustice as well as 12-year-old world things like first crushes and fights with your best friend. At the same time it’s a mystery with a time travel element.

It’s one of the lovely things about this book to me, that it deals effectively with the real concerns of a real world 12 year old growing up in New York City in the 70’s. And all the sci fi / physics / time travel parts are only understood from a 12-year-old’s perspective. Time travel can be mind bending for adults. But since the protagonist is trying to wrap her own young mind about it, it seems more believable.

This book made me cry and then laugh 2 sentences later.

For an adult example of slipstream, I always cite The Time Traveler’s Wife because the book is less about time travel and more a tragic love story about how to be in a relationship when your partner is unstuck in time. The relationship is real and gritty and challenging like every other relationship out there – you try to see if you could stay in a long-term relationship with a time traveler who had no control of when he left!

(I know there are people out there who dislike time travel stories and I’d say don’t let that scare you away from either book)

Middle Grade Lit? What is it?

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I’ve seen several blogs that feature “Marvelous Middle Grade Mondays” where they review books or discuss middle grade literature-related things. My Brain on Books is one of them and she lists the others at the end of her posts.

Because it’s, hey, Monday, I thought I would chime in with a post about what this fast growing demographic is about.

When I was at the ReadDating event in Vancouver, where authors and librarians chatted in small genre groups, I was surprised when a librarian asked me what “middle grade literature” meant. When I explained, she said, “Oh, we categorize that as juvenile literature.”

When I told a friend I was working on a middle grade novel, he thought I was referring to the quality of the work or some literature rating scale.

Even parents aren’t sure what it means. They think of “middle school,” which means different things in different states. When I taught in Colorado, Middle School was 6 – 8th grades.

Middle grade literature has loosely been defined as geared towards the 8-12 year old reader. But kids are 8 yrs old when they enter 3rd grade and 12 yrs old when they enter 7th grade. That’s a pretty large reading discrepancy and many authors, including myself, refer to their books as “lower middle grade” or “upper middle grade.” I’ve even heard some use the word “tween fiction” to indicate the 10-12 audience, but there’s no classification for that in the bookstores or libraries . . . yet.

In lower middle grade literature, there is less grey area between right and wrong, time and distance can be truncated to move the story, and characters can be less complex, even cartoonish. Not much internal angst. I write for upper middle grade because I like that moral grey area, I want my stories, even speculative fiction, to be believable, and I like a little angst.

(don’t even get me started on those book series (I’m looking at you, Harry Potter) that start off as MG and work their way into YA as the protagonist ages)

One reason I enjoy writing for this age group is because of my memories of becoming an independent reader. I remember the excitement of picking my own novels out at the library. I remember staying up far past my bedtime to read a book I’d already read 3 times before (Rats of NIMH, Phantom Tollbooth, Chronicles of Narnia, Harriet the Spy).

So what defines Middle Grade lit other than it’s aimed at 8-12 yr olds and is about, well, stuff that is important to middle graders?

First, most often the protagonist in children’s lit is slightly older than the intended reader. So, a 10-year-old would like to read about a 12-year-old.

A publisher at the SCBWI conference said that Middle Grade lit is about the protagonist fitting into the world (as opposed to YA where the protagonist becomes an individual from the world). Also, Middle Grade lit has much stricter guidelines about content, especially sexual situations (i.e. you can’t shelve anything with sexual content in the Middle Grade section of bookstores). Culturally, in the U.S., violence is more tolerated than sex in MG/YA lit.

Boys still read in the middle grades. Sadly, we lose a lot of boy readers when they hit high school.

If you have anything to add to this conversation, feel free. I’m sure there’s much more to be said.