New middle grade realistic fiction 2024

 I'm branching out from all the speculative fiction I've been reading to catch up on some realistic fiction.  Here are two of my new favorites!

The first one is called "The Partition Project" by Saadia Faruqi.   She also wrote this one that I liked a lot too called "A Place at the Table"  It's about Maha (short for Mahnoor) who lives in Texas with her loving parents and her older brother.  The story opens with the family at the airport getting ready to pick up Dadi, who is Maha's dad's adoptive mother.  Dadi is going to come and live with the family and Maha is meant to act as a kind of a baby-sitter to Dadi.  Maha is not happy about losing her bedroom (she gets her own room, but it's up in the attic) to Dadi and she's struggling to connect to Dadi, who is often abrupt and and kind of cranky.  Maha's deepest passion is journalism and she's very excited when her teacher assigns them a documentary project.  Except she has no idea what to do the documentary about.  Dadi has been telling her stories about her earlier life and Maha decides to do the project about the partitioning of India, but she ends up so obsessed with the documentary that she forgets about a novel study project she was supposed to be working on with her best friend, Kim.  They end up in a big argument and Maha worries that she will never be friends with Kim again.  This is an interesting story to read-there are big themes of family and family history, especially family history that's painful.  There are also themes of friendship and commitment to a task, of telling a good story and finding family. It would be fun to use this book as a springboard for a documentary project. It would also be interesting to use this a doorway to talking about the food of different cultures-Dadi is a really great cook and the food she cooks sounds amazing!    I really liked this story and I think it a lot of middle graders are going to like this one too.  

The second one is a sequel, which I don't typically read.  I don't typically read sequels because there are so many new books published each year that I tend to prioritize new stories.  BUT, sometimes a story is SO compelling you need to stick around for the second part and that was THIS story.  This one is called Coyote Lost and Found by Dan Gemeinhart.  I'm a BIG fan of Dan Gemeinhart's work, which you might know if you've been reading my blog.  I really liked The Midnight Children. I also really liked Some Kind of Courage.    But this is the one, The Remarkable Journey of Coyote Sunrise that is the prequel to Coyote Lost and Found.  It's probably a good idea if you read Coyote Sunrise first, if you haven't and it's amazing.  Because, spoiler alert-you need the backstory of Coyote Sunrise.  Dan Gemeinhart will give it to you at the beginning of Coyote Lost and Found  but the way Coyote Sunrise unfolds is total magic.  Coyote Lost and Found then, is about Coyote (or Ella) who is no longer living in a bus with her dad, instead they have moved into a house and Coyote has started middle school.  This is not an easy thing for a young woman like Coyote who has lived with just her dad, being homeschooled (or schooled by herself, mostly).  She's so different from the other kids, the way she dresses, her lack of interest in a phone and social media, her love of books. So when she finds a box on the bus that contains her mother's ashes, Coyote and her dad go on a quest to try to find where her mom wanted her ashes spread.  She left the directions in her favorite book, except that Coyote accidentally gave the book away several months ago.  She doesn't want to tell her dad, because it makes him really sad.  So once she convinces him to go on a road trip, she also recruits her best friend Salvador and her dad brings a friend along too, much to Coyote's dismay.  So the lost and found, is not only about the book, but also about gaining closure from other big losses and trying to find what's new and what's enduring.  This is just as wonderful as the first book and the kids who were too young to read Coyote Sunrise when it first came out are going to love discovering Coyote as a character and getting to read about both these chapters of her life.  

Here's the cover:

And here's an interview that Colby Sharp did with Dan about Coyote Lost and Found.