New middle grade fantasy fiction

Ahhh, a long weekend filled with rainy days.  A tropical disturbance that's dumping rain but no real drama?  I'm in.  And LOTS of good books to read.  So here are two that are coming to a book store near you soon!

The first one is called "The Darkdeep" and it's written by Allie Condie and Brandon Reichs.  I loved Condie's work but haven't read any of Reichs (which I'm TOTALLY going to fix), but since it's the start of a brand new (what I assume will be) series, I'm not sure it matters.  "The Darkdeep" is about a group of kids who live in a small town in the Pacific Northwest.  There are three kids-Nico, Emma and Tyler who are solid friends.  Opal used to be their friend, but now appears to be friends with the town bully, Logan.  Logan is mad at Nico because Nico's dad is forest ranger and has made recommendations that have damaged Logan's family's business.  Nico, Emma, and Tyler are out flying a drone that Nico had been saving up for a long time, when Logan's posse comes by.  Logan flies Nico's drone out off the edge of a cliff and then leaves.  Opal comes back to apologize or help find the drone and finds that in an effort to find the drone, Nico has fallen off the edge of a cliff.  The kids desperately try to find him and all end up on a small island that they didn't know was there.  There is a small house there and the kids go in to get warm and find that in addition to a bunch of old artifacts,  there is a mysterious pond in the basement of the house.  The pond is black and still and doesn't reflect any light.  Emma decides to do a little scientific testing on the pond and sticks her foot in.  She's immediately sucked into the pond and the other kids find her on the other side of the island, apparently unhurt, until a giant purple bear appears.  This is a VERY exciting book with lots of heart pounding action.  There's also a lovely theme about facing your fears and forgiveness.  This is going to be a terrific book for my students who really love a scary book, because there are lots of parts that are REALLY scary.   I think fourth and fifth graders would really like this one but it might be a bit too intense for the third graders.  This one comes out in October.

The second one is called "Wicked Nix" by Lena Coakley.  In the intro, she tells readers that this is a deeply personal story and I LOVED knowing that as I read it.  The description on Goodreads says it's visually stunning, but I was reading it as an ARC on my iPad and it had a few lovely black and white drawings, but for what I saw, I couldn't really attest to it's visual appeal.  The drawings were nice, but there weren't very many of them.  The story on the other hand, was terrific.  It's a fairy tale about a fairy named Nix.  He's sort of a marooned fairy, because the queen and all the other fairies have left him and he doesn't really know why.  He's determined to make sure they are proud of him, so when a people moves into the empty house in the woods, he's going to get that people out of there, using all his fairy tricks.  He's aided by Mr. Green, a mysterious figure that appears sometimes in the woods.  But as he starts trying to play tricks on the human (it's an older man), Nix finds he really doesn't have any fairy magic and he seems to be immune to the magics that would hurt fairies.  My students have been begging me for books about fairies and I think this one is going to make them really, really happy.  I think this would be a great one for all the middle graders and that there would be a lot of places where you could stop and dig deep into the book for instructional purposes like foreshadowing or character analysis or the character's voice.  I liked this one a lot.