Cultural magical mysteries for middle graders

 If you don't read a lot of middle grade fiction, you might not know that cultural magical mysteries are kind of a thing right now.  Rick Riordan started it with Greek myths and the Lightning Thief before moving into Roman myths, Norse Myths, Egyptian myths and thanks to his new publishing imprint, Rick Riordan Presents, we've been treated to Indian Myths from Roshani Choskhi with Aru Shah, Mayan folklore with J C Cervantes and the Storm Runner series,  Korean folklore from Yoon Ha Lee and the Dragon Pearl series, African American folklore from Kwame Mbalia and his hero-Tristan Strong, Cuban culture with Carlos Hernandez and his hilarious adventures with Sal and Gabi,  as well as Native American folklore from Rebecca Roanhorse and her series, Race to the Sun.  It's enough to leave you breathless!  AND it turns out that other authors are also able to bring out their cultural influences to tell completely amazing stories.  So here are two that I really liked.

The first one I finished this morning, when I fully intended to sleep late but woke up at 4 am with a bad case of monkey mind (you know that one-your mind hops around from idea to completely unrelated idea torturing you with all the things you SHOULD have done).  The good news was that I had this terrific book to read!  It's called The Girl Giant and the Monkey King by Van Hoang.  It's about Thom, a girl who just moved from California to a small town in Georgia and she is really struggling.  She loves to play soccer but it turns out that she's freakishly strong.  She accidentally kicks a ball toward the goal and injures the goalie so badly the girl has to be hospitalized.  Thom's Vietnamese immigrant mom is always trying to make her be more Vietnamese by eating stinky Vietnamese food and wearing Vietnamese clothing.  The other girls on the team bully Thom and Thom keeps thinking that if they just moved back to California, things would be great.  After an argument, Thom's mother takes her to the local Buddhist temple and Thom finds a funny golden pin, which she puts in her pocket and forgets about, until she gets home and a handsome monkey boy is in her bedroom.  It turns out he's the Monkey King who has been hidden in a mountain for the last 500 years because he wanted to become a god (instead of a demon).  He tells Thom that he can teach her how to control her powers and together they can become very powerful.  This is a really fun story to read.  Hoang does an amazing job of showing how difficult it is to straddle two cultures (in this case, Vietnamese culture and American culture).  Thom's frustration with both cultures is crystal clear and her deep longing to be accepted and appreciated comes through loud and clear.  The cultural elements are fleshed out enough that even someone (like me) that has no background information about Vietnamese culture can understand and appreciate the story line that weaves through the folklore.  The adventure is fast paced and although the story line wasn't completely resolved, I'm really looking forward to the next book!

The second one is called Kiki Kallira Breaks a Kingdom by Sangu Mandanna.  It's about Kiki who is of Indian descent and lives with her mom in London.  Kiki struggles with anxiety to a point that it's starting to interfere with her life-in the opening of the book, she cuts short a trip with friends to a local amusement park because she can't remember if she left the front door unlocked and she's so worried that something might happen to her mother, that she decides to go home.  She finds that drawing helps ease her anxiety or at least give her something else to think about, so she spends her time drawing an elaborate alternate world where she is in control.  At least she feels in control until her desk bursts into flames and she's pulled into the world by her alter ego-Ashwini.  It turns out an evil demon has co-opted her world and if she doesn't kill him, her entire creation plus the normal world will be destroyed.  No pressure really!  Kiki has struggles to make sense of all this, plus come up with a plan for how to destroy an evil demon.  It's exciting and surprising and remarkably empathetic.  The piece about Kiki's anxiety is really interesting -almost like Neal Shusterman's book "Challenger Deep" where you wonder if this is just Kiki's way of working through this terrible anxiety by creating this fantasy world, or if it's just a fantasy story.  I really liked this one and it's action packed enough to keep the kids entertained.  I can't wait to put it in my library. 

Here's a book trailer.

And here's the cover image.