We’re already heading into the second quarter of 2025. Just because Middle-Grade March has ended, it doesn’t mean we need to stop reading middle-grade books. If you need inspiration, here are some great new books.
April
Title: The Cartoonists Club
Author: Raina Telgemeier
Publisher: Scholastic
Publication Date: April 1, 2025
Makayla is bursting with ideas but doesn’t know how to make them into a story. Howard loves to draw, but he struggles to come up with ideas and his dad thinks comics are a waste of time. Lynda constantly draws in her sketchbook but keeps focusing on what she feels are mistakes, and Art simply loves being creative and is excited to try something new. They come together to form The Cartoonists Club, where kids can learn about making comics and use their creativity and imagination for their own storytelling adventures!
Title: Rebellion 1776
Author: Laurie Halse Anderson
Publisher: Atheneum/Caitlyn Dlouhy Books
Publication Date: April 1
In the spring of 1776, thirteen-year-old Elsbeth Culpepper wakes to the sound of cannons. It’s the Siege of Boston, the Patriots’ massive drive to push the Loyalists out that turns the city into a chaotic war zone. Elsbeth’s father—her only living relative—has gone missing, leaving her alone and adrift in a broken town while desperately seeking employment to avoid the orphanage.
Just when things couldn’t feel worse, the smallpox epidemic sweeps across Boston. Now, Bostonians must fight for their lives against an invisible enemy in addition to the visible one. While a treatment is being frantically fine-tuned, thousands of people rush in from the countryside begging for inoculation. At the same time, others refuse protection, for the treatment is crude at best and at times more dangerous than the disease itself.
Elsbeth, who had smallpox as a small child and is now immune, finds work taking care of a large, wealthy family with discord of their own as they await a turn at inoculation, but as the epidemic and the revolution rage on, will she find her father?
Title: Afia In The Land of Wonders
Author: Mia Araujo
Publisher: Scholastic
Publication Date: April 15
Afia has always felt like half of a whole. Her twin sister, Aya, is perfectly happy with fulfilling their family’s expectations of them. But Afia dreams of exploring the world beyond her secluded cliffside home of Dafra. She dreams of adventure.
When she meets a charming shape-shifter named Bakame, who dazzles her with promises of a magical land called Ijabu, Afia decides to take her destiny into her own hands. Although it will mean leaving everything she has ever known behind, including her beloved sister, Afia follows Bakame into the forbidden forests surrounding Dafra, from which no one has ever returned.
Filled with magical sights, a charismatic Queen and her intriguing court, Ijabu is everything that Afia has ever dreamed of. But she soon discovers that nothing is as it seems, and this fantasy world demands a terrible price. With the help of a mysterious trickster, Afia must evade the Queen’s hunters and the lost dreamers of Ijabu, who wish to pull her deeper into their web.
Now, Afia must find the courage to survive while standing on her own—or risking losing herself completely to the wonders of Ijabu.
Debut author-illustrator Mia Araujo weaves an extraordinarily luminous and beautiful story, inspired by Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, about what it takes to find your true self, even if it means facing your deepest fears.
Title: Friend or UFO (The Area 51 Files)
Author: Julie Buxbaum
Publisher: Delacorte Press
Publication Date: April 15
Sky’s life in Area 51 is full of surprises. Like the fact that aliens are real—and now one is her best friend! But the biggest surprise yet comes when Sky learns that her grandmother has been kidnapped and is stuck in Area 52, the only other alien portal on Earth. Even more bananas? Her grandma has been an undercover FBAI agent for YEARS. Like Sky’s whole entire life. How could Sky not have known her grandma had a secret identity?
Uncle Anish says to leave this whole mess to him. For reals this time. The kids just have to hang tight. Spoiler The kids do not, and will never, hang tight.
There’s just one No one knows the location of Area 52. In order to solve this mystery and save Sky’s grandma, Sky and her friends will have to solve a series of secret puzzles and codes, traverse the Area 51 library for clues, break into FBAI headquarters, and more. But someone doesn’t want Sky to solve this mystery, and they’ve got their eyes on her…
May
Title: The Gate, the Girl and the Dragon
Author: Grace Lin
Publisher: Brown’s Books for Young Readers
Publication Date: May 6
Jin is a Stone Lion—one of the guardians of the Old City Gate who is charged to watch over humans and protect the Sacred Sphere. But to Jin, those boring duties feel like a waste of time.
What isn’t a waste of time? Perfecting his zuqiu kick, scoring a Golden Goal, and becoming the most legendary player of all the spirit world.
But when Jin’s perfect kick accidentally knocks the Sacred Sphere out through the gate, he has no choice but to run after it, tumbling out of the realm he calls home and into the human world as the gate closes behind him.
Stuck outside the gate, Jin must find help from unlikely allies, including a girl who can hear a mysterious voice and a worm who claims he is a dragon. Together, they must find the sphere and return it to the world beyond the gate…or risk losing everything.
Title: Where There Be Monsters
Author: Alby C. Williams
Publisher: Roaring Brook Press
Publication Date: May 6
Eleven-year-old Glory Brown is desperate for adventure far from her family’s quaint, quiet life at The Light Inn. Generations of Browns have been stewards of this humble hotel, which acts as a sanctuary in the stretch of monster-filled land called the Seam. But Glory wants nothing more than to learn how to use her Moxie, a special magic only kids have, and to train to become a Spherinaut like her mother, exploring and documenting the perilous depths of the Outersphere.
When a mysterious boy named Marcus appears one day on a top-secret mission for the Parliamentarium – the school for aspiring Spherinauts – Glory packs up her beloved books and sets off on a once-in-a-lifetime journey that will shuttle her across time and space…and reveal new dangers lurking in the worlds beyond the Seam.
For there’s mischief afoot that’s threatening the balance between the worlds, its magic, and its monsters. And it’s up to Glory to find a solution before it’s too late.
June
Title: Chef’s Secret (Front Desk bk. 6)
Author: Kelly Yang
Publisher: Scholastic
Publication Date: June 3
Jason Yao has one goal-to become a true, modern chef. He’s not entirely sure what that means yet, but he knows it means being a better version of who he used to be (that is, someone who was in the principal’s office three times a week and swiped cash from his dad’s motels to buy video games). Jason has a much better grip on his temper now that Mia Tang is in his life. But it still hovers, right beneath the surface, threatening to come out-especially when he returns from Chinatown and tells his parents about his new relationship with Mia … and his parents say he’s not allowed to have a girlfriend.
As Jason fights to pursue his own path and be the chef he knows he can be, he’ll have to find the courage to stay calm, speak up, and share his heart. Luckily he has Mia, who is brave enough to face anything … even Jason’s parents!
Title: Some & Mirrors
Author: Rosalyn Ranshaw
Publisher: Amulet Books
Publication Date: June 10
Spending the summer with his aunt as the only Black kid in a small Midwestern town was bad enough, but now Andy Carter’s summer has been effectively ruined. His dad’s parole hearing is postponed, he misses his friends, and—when an old barn burns down—he’s stuck taking the blame.
Andy is sentenced with helping the barn’s owner, a cantankerous old man, renovate his crumbling mansion—a mansion that hides a mystery. It was once owned by the famous magician the Red Nave. In 1954, the Nave was a wanted suspect in the town’s most infamous murder before disappearing without a trace.
The whole town is sure the Red Nave is guilty, but to Andy, things just don’t add up. Investigating a mystery from the ’50s isn’t the same as spending time with his dad, but Andy can’t help but be drawn into the Red Nave’s exciting world of magic and illusion. To solve the Nave’s final vanishing act, Andy teams up with another boy he doesn’t quite trust. Secret by secret, they try to uncover the Red Nave’s identity and learn why his last performance came to such a tragic end.
With a gripping combination of hidden doors, shocking twists, and deep emotional heart, Smoke & Mirrors asks the How much of the truth is what you can get people to believe?
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Some good ones here. Thanks for the heads up.