Middle Grade fiction standouts 2026

 How lucky I am to get to read some of these amazing new books that are just coming out?  Wait till you read these!  

The first one is a novel in verse and it's historical fiction.  It's called "A Year without Home"  and it's written by V. T. Bidania and according to the author's notes, is a story about her family's experience as they traveled from their home in Laos, to a refugee camp in Thailand, to a second refugee camp in Thailand and then to the US.  The story is told by Gao Sheng, who is the oldest child in her family and as a girl, she is not considered as important as her brother, Yia.  She is expected to be hard working, dutiful, and well behaved and she tries hard to fill that role.  Her home in Laos contains most of her immediate family-her grandmother, her aunts and uncles, her parents and siblings and they have most everything they need.  Her father is an officer in the Laotian military and when the Laotian government falls to the communists, he knows it's time to go.  Their harrowing journey through Laos and finally to the refugee camp in Thailand is a gripping reminder that immigrants don't always have an option to just get on a plane and come to a new country.  Sometimes it's a journey fraught with peril and the poems do an excellent job of showing what that was like.  Once in the refugee camp, there are also hurdles, like finding a place to sleep and navigating the systems that the relief agencies put it in place.  There is also a lot of information about Hmong culture, the food they like to eat, how families are connected, the importance of education, and the role of women.  This would be a great book to compare to other books about refugees, like Inside Out and Back Again by Thanhha Lai, When Stars are Scatted by Victoria Jamieson, or Other Words for Home by Jasmine Warga.  There are big themes of family, Hmong culture, immigration and refugees, and dealing with hardships.  The free verse poetry structure makes the book really approachable.  I think kids are going to love this one.  

The second one is also historical fiction.  It's by Sara Pennypacker and it's called "The Lions' Run".  It's about Lucas DuBois, an orphan living at an abbey in a town near Chantilly, which is north of Paris, during World War 2.  Lucas doesn't know anything about his birth family-his mother left him at the abbey when he was just a few days old but he's often bullied because he loves animals and is kind to the smaller boys.  He is old enough to work outside the abbey and does deliveries for the greengrocer.  The story opens with him getting ready to go to work when one of the Sisters has asked the two oldest boys, Claude and Marcel, to get rid of a cat living under the tool shed.  She has a new litter of kittens and the Sister believes they already have too many mouths to feed.  Lucas begs the boys to give him the kittens, but they give him a beating and throw the bag full of kittens into the river.  Lucas rescues the kittens and finds an old barn to hide them, except that someone else is already there-a girl named Alice.  Her dad is a horse trainer and they have been living near the racing track to train horses but her mother believes that it is no longer safe for them in France, so they are planning to leave, but Alice doesn't want to leave without her beloved race horse, Bia.  She has devised a plan to get Bia out safely but it will take about 6 weeks for all the pieces to be in place.  About the same time, Lucas is making deliveries to a place that is a maternity home or Lebensborn- a place that has been set aside for young unwed women to come and give birth to babies that will then be adopted by good Nazi families.  One of the young women starts talking to Lucas (which is forbidden) because he reminds her of her younger brother.  She explains that she plans to get her baby back after he's been adopted to a Nazi family.  Lucas wants to do the right thing in all of these situations and the tangling of each of the storylines makes for compelling reading.  In addition to the very compelling characters, there are big themes of survival during a time of conflict, kindness, doing the right thing, found families, and empathy.  I loved this book and read it in mostly one sitting.   I think kids are going to love it too.