Middle Grade Books my eight weeks of reading

Over the last eight weeks I have been travelling and reading books on my Kindle. I have made my way through lots of titles from my wish list and I have given nearly all of them four or five stars. Here are a few of the over twenty I read.

Over the coming days and weeks, I will explore each of these in detail.

Publisher blurb: Marcus has one brother in a youth offender centre and the other is working with their dad on plans for their next theft. Everyone assumes Marcus will follow in their footsteps, but he has other ideas, different hopes. When a mysterious accident lands a man in hospital, it confirms what everyone in their community expects and Marcus gets the blame. He feels trapped. Only new girl Emma - with her peace protest banners and political badges - questions this story. Can they work together to clear his name – and help Marcus become the person he really wants to be."

Part of the bookseller blurb: Being a typewriter is not as easy as it looks. Surrounded by books (notorious attention hogs) and recently replaced by a computer, Olivetti has been forgotten by the Brindle family--the humans he's lived with for years. The Brindles are busy: Dad (Felix) and Mom (Beatrice) work constantly, three of their children put the extra in extra-curriculars, and Ernest, their shy, guarded twelve-year-old, goes off alone to read his collection of Oxford English Dictionaries. The least they could do was remember Olivetti once in a while, since he remembers every word they've typed on him. It's a thankless job, keeping memories alive.

Publisher blurb: Flora and her brother, Julian, don’t believe they were born. They’ve lived in so many foster homes, they can’t remember where they came from. And even now that they’ve been adopted, Flora still struggles to believe that they’ve found their forever home. Though Flora is trying her best to trust two new people, when she finds out that there will be a new baby, she’s worried that there won’t be enough love for everyone. So along with their new mother, Flora and Julian begin a journey to go back and discover their past—for only then can they really begin to build their future.

This is a class Young Adult title from the US published in 1943 and it is a long book with 528 pages.

Bookseller blurb: Twelve-year-old Clara lives on an island that visitors call exotic - but there's nothing exotic about it to Clara. he loves eating ripe mangoes off the ground running outside in the rainy season and going to her secret hideout with Gaynah even though lately Gaynah hasn't been acting like a best friend. The only thing in Clara's life that's out of the ordinary is her memory: a hurricane hit last summer and now she can't remember anything that happened that season. Sometimes things come back to her in drips like a tap that hasn't been turned off properly. Other times her mother fills in the blanks. When Clara meets Rudy newly arrived from England her memories slowly start to return and the pair embark upon a summer neither will ever forget.

Publisher blurb: When you’re an identical twin, your story always starts with someone else. For Iris, that means her story starts with Lark. Iris has always been the grounded, capable, and rational one; Lark has been inventive, dreamy, and brilliant—and from their first moments in the world together, they’ve never left each other’s side. Everyone around them realized early on what the two sisters already knew: they had better outcomes when they were together. When fifth grade arrives, however, it's decided that Iris and Lark should be split into different classrooms, and something breaks in them both.

Iris is no longer so confident; Lark retreats into herself as she deals with challenges at school. And at the same time, something strange is happening in the city around them, things both great and small going missing without a trace. As Iris begins to understand that anything can be lost in the blink of an eye, she decides it’s up to her to find a way to keep her sister safe.

Here are the other books I will talk about from my holiday reading. I also have a plan to talk about the IBBY Congress in Trieste, the Festival of Words (Jersey UK), Seven Stories in Newcastle-on-Tyne, and the Brian Wildsmith exhibition I visited in Barnsley.