New magical middle grade fiction 2023
If I haven't said it often enough, reading for the CYBILS award is so much fun. It's a lot of work (well, if you call reading LOTS of middle grade chapter books work) but then there are THESE treasures you can uncover. The first one is called Juniper Harvey and the Vanishing Kingdom. It's written by Nina Varela. I hadn't read anything by her before but this one was so good! It's about Juniper, or June who has recently moved from Dallas, Texas to a small town in southern Florida. She isn't so good at making friends but she's pretty good at disappearing into a crowd. She likes to draw and has been busy drawing a graphic novel, but she's been having these REALLY weird and realistic dreams. She doesn't want to worry her parents, who already worry about her not having friends and fitting in and her friends in Dallas seem to have forgotten about her. But one night, she has to deal with her dream, because one of the people from her d...