Missing Mom - middle grade fiction 2024

 It's funny how sometimes there's kind of a "thing" in middle grade literature.  This week, I read two different books that were published in the same week and both were about kids who were dealing with a missing mom.  It's fairly often that children are left to their own devices, particularly in middle grade literature-think James and the Giant Peach, Harry Potter, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, to name a few, so it's not really surprising to find missing parents, but these two books both showed the emotional toll this can take on kids, particularly if the leaving hasn't been explained to them.  Let me show you what I mean.

The first one is called Olivetti.  It's written by Allie Millington and it appears that this is her first book but she has several that are coming out in the next year or so.  Here's a link to her website if you want to find out more.  This story is told from two perspectives, one is Ernest, who is 12 and is having a hard time dealing with a terrible thing that happened in his family.  Ernest doesn't really have any friends, isn't really interested in using his phone or social media and spends time reading the dictionary because he feels really different from everyone in his family.  The other is Olivetti, which is an Olivetti typewriter that Beatrice (Ernest's mom) bought years ago and has used often and well.  Olivetti is disdainful of many things (small sticky children, computers, and especially books).  But Olivetti is being squeezed off of Beatrice's desk-there are piles of papers, dictionaries, pens, and lately, a computer.  But should anyone care to listen, Olivetti has a lot to say.  But Bernice is sad.  She's so sad that she's decided to leave the family.  She takes Olivetti to a pawn shop and receives $126 and then she disappears.  The family is bereft and doesn't understand why she left, so they have a lot of questions as well as blaming themselves.  Ernest finds Olivetti in the pawn shop and is very surprised when Olivetti starts typing on his own.  Ernest doesn't have $126 to buy Olivetti back so he steals Olivetti, aided by a girl who works in the store, Quinn.  Ernest and Quinn, with help from Olivetti try to figure out what happened to Ernest's mom.  This is a really fun story to read.  It's really well written and the two different voices, of Ernest and Olivetti are so clear.  There are big themes of family and love, of communicating with the people you love, even if it's hard, of coping strategies when things are hard.  It's a really great story.  Isn't this a gorgeous cover?  

The second one is by one of my favorite authors-Jamie Sumner.  She has written books like Roll With It and Maid For It and One Kid's Trash.  You can find more of them on her website here.  She has a real gift for characters and puts them in some pretty interesting situations.  This one is about Tully, who has decided that to get her mom back (remember my theme today?), she's going to become the youngest swimmer to swim across Lake Tahoe, called The Godfather swim, because you end up right in front of a mansion that was part of the Godfather movie.  She knows her dad won't let her (he thinks it's too dangerous) so she recruits her best friend, Arch, to be her support person and to take video of the swim, so they can prove she really did the whole thing.  Tully's mom has had a kind of a mental health crisis and neither Tully nor her dad know where she is.  Tully misses her mom desperately and has tried long and hard to impress her mom and she KNOWS that this marathon swim is exactly the way to get her back.  Jamie wrote this novel in verse, so it's a quick read, but it's so compelling, you won't want to put it down.  As Tully swims, she is thinking  about the times when her mom helped with physical training so that she'd be ready to do a long swim, but also about the mental challenge of long swim.  As I was reading, I found myself wanting to cheer Tully on!  There are themes of friendship and courage.  Themes of mental health and coping, themes of parenting and becoming your own person.  It's a wonderful book and I know kids are going to like it.