5 Rad New Middle Grade Books to Read if You Loved These ’80s Classics

If you loved the spunky, clever voice of Lois Lowry’s Anastasia Krupnik series, you’ll fall for Delphine, the stoic, whip-smart main character of Rita Williams-Garcia’s award-winning One Crazy Summer (and its followup P.S. Be Eleven). Delphine’s story, set within the backdrop of the Black Panther movement, is at its heart also about love and family, and like Anastasia’s, Delphine’s complicated mother, an activist and poet, is beautifully drawn.

While Judy Blume’s Tiger Eyes is a bit grittier, Tracy Holczer’s The Secret Hum of a Daisy is no less emotionally sophisticated, as it too takes on the aftermath of the sudden loss of a parent. Like Davey of Tiger Eyes, who must grieve in New Mexico, far away from her old life, twelve-year old Grace must find a way to come to terms with the past while living with the Grandmother she’s never known in Tracy Holczer’s lyrical debut novel.

Ann M. Martin’s simple, but no less affecting stories are about navigating friendship, crushes, school, and family with the members of The Baby-Sitters Club. Michelle Schusterman’s series, I Heart Band, deals with similar stories, but set around the life of seventh grader Holly Mead and her school band. There are sleepovers and fundraisers, school dances and competitions and, through it all, a focus on banding together to stay forever friends.

If you loved Homecoming by Cynthia Voigt, the first of a series of books about the Tillerman family, try Lynda Mullaly Hunt’s One For the Murphys. When Carley Connors is placed in foster care at the doorstep of the Murphys, she struggles to understand where she belongs in a happy, loving family that eats around the dinner table and has prepared lunches and new clothes. Like Dicey Tillerman, Carley has the same tough exterior and a fierce, protective loyalty to her family, both the one she’s been forced to leave behind, and the new one she finds within the Murphy household.

Both Katherine Paterson’s 1981 Newbery award-winning Jacob Have I Loved and Esther Ehrlich’s Nest take on the same mystical, salty-air quality with their poetic language and emotional depth. While Paterson’s Sara Louise finds a way to overcome living in the shadow of her talented sister on the shores of the Chesapeake Bay, Naomi “Chirp” Orenstein, the delightful heroine of Nest, copes with her mother’s serious illness and finds her independence in the beautiful natural world of Cape Cod.
What were your favorite middle grade reads in the 1980s?