How to Survive Middle School
10 best books like How to Survive Middle School (Donna Gephart): Shooting Kabul, Wish, Countdown, The Total Tragedy of a Girl Named Hamlet, Love, Aubrey, Little Blog on the Prairie, Funny Business, Black Radishes, The Year Money Grew on Trees, Dumped by Popular Demand
In the summer of 2001, twelve-year-old Fadi's parents make the difficult decision to illegally leave Afghanistan and move the family to the United States. When their underground transport arrives at the rendezvous point, chaos ensues, and Fadi is left dragging his younger sister Mariam through...
| Author | Joseph Monninger |
| ISBN | 0385739419 |
Bee’s brother, Tommy, knows everything there is to know about sharks. He also knows that his life will be cut short by cystic fibrosis. And so does Bee.
That’s why she wants to make his wish-foundation-sponsored trip to swim with a great white shark an unforgettable memory.
But...
| Author | Deborah Wiles |
| ISBN | 0545106052 |
Franny Chapman just wants some peace. But that's hard to get when her best friend is feuding with her, her sister has disappeared, and her uncle is fighting an old war in his head. Her saintly younger brother is no help, and the cute boy across the street only complicates things. Worst of all, everyone is...
| Author | Erin Dionne |
| ISBN | 0803732988 |
Hamlet Kennedy just wants to be your average, happy, vanilla eighth grader. But with Shakespearean scholar parents who dress in Elizabethan regalia and generally go about in public as if it were the sixteenth century, that’s not terribly easy. It gets worse when they decide that Hamlet’s genius...
| Author | Suzanne LaFleur |
| ISBN | 0385737742 |
"I had everything I needed to run a household: a house, food, and a new family. From now on it would just be me and Sammy–the two of us, and no one else."
A tragic accident has turned eleven-year-old Aubrey’s world upside down. Starting a new life all alone, Aubrey has everything she thinks she needs:...
| Author | Cathleen Davitt Bell |
| ISBN | 1599902869 |
Gen's family is more comfortable spending time apart than together. Then Gen's mom signs them up for Camp Frontier—a vacation that promises the "thrill" of living like 1890s pioneers. Forced to give up all of her modern possessions, Gen nevertheless manages to email her friends back home about...
| Author | Jon Scieszka |
| ISBN | 0061963739 |
It’s here: Volume One of the official Guys Read Library. Jon Scieszka’s Guys Read initiative was founded on a simple premise: that young guys enjoy reading most when they have reading they can enjoy. And out of this comes a series that aims to give them just that. Ten books, arranged by theme, featuring...
| Author | Susan Lynn Meyer |
| ISBN | 0385738811 |
Sydney Taylor Honor Award Winner Black Radishes is a suspenseful WWII/Holocaust story, in which one boy learns what it means to be Jewish and French at a time when everything is changing.
It is March of 1940. The French believe that their army can protect them from Nazi Germany. But...
The Year Money Grew on Trees
| Author | Aaron Hawkins |
| ISBN | 0547279779 |
With frostbitten fingers, sleepless nights and sore muscles, 14-year-old Jackson Jones and his posse of cousins discover the lost art of winging it when they take over an orchard of 300 wild apple trees. They know nothing about pruning or irrigation or pest control, but figure it out they must—if...
| Author | P.G. Kain |
| ISBN | 1416935193 |
Dorie Dilts is about to move from California to New Jersey, and instead of seeing this as the worst thing to happen to her in her 13 years, Dorie sees this as a great opportunity--an opportunity to reinvent herself as one of the popular crowd, that is. When she arrives at her new school, she immediately sets...
| Author | Nancy E. Mercado |
| ISBN | 0803728735 |
Do you remember middle school? Are you trying to forget, thank you very much?
Well, these ten short stories will certainly remind young readers of the trials and tribulations of their everyday existence . . . and make them laugh out loud at the same time.
From Angela Johnson's funny...
| Author | Dori Hillestad Butler |
| ISBN | 0807580953 |
The Truth about Truman School was a total surprise.
I bought the book at the school's Book Fair for two reasons. It was marked $2.50 (and well within my budget) and the back cover said that it was about teens who decide to tell the truth about life in middle school, not the expurgated lies adults...
| Author | Jill S. Alexander |
| ISBN | 0312548567 |
Almost-15-year-old Austin Gray is tired of standing at the curb and watching the parade pass her by. Literally. She decides this is the year she’ll ride on the hood of a shiny pickup truck in the annual parade, waving to the crowd and finally showing the town bully that she’s got what it takes to be the...
| Author | David Klass |
| ISBN | 0374399514 |
Ketchvar III's mission is simple: travel to Planet Earth, inhabit the body of an average teenager, and determine if the human race should be annihilated. And so Ketchvar—who, to human eyes, looks just like a common snail—crawls into the brain of one Tom Filber and attempts to do his analysis. At...
| Author | Jim Krieg |
| ISBN | 1595142762 |
Griff Carver knows a thing or two about fighting crime.
No, he cannot be bought. He cannot be frightened. And he will not sleep until justice is served. Because Griff Carver is not just any kid--he's a kid with a badge. And if you are a rule breaker, he's your worst nightmare.
Griff might...
| Author | Leslie Margolis |
| ISBN | 1599905264 |
Annabelle has tamed the wild boys and catty girls of middle school. Now it's time for her first school dance! A couple of Annabelle's friends already have dates and she would like one, too. Better yet, she finally has a crush on someone-Oliver. The problem? Claire also likes him, and she's called dibs....
| Author | Dean Pitchford |
| ISBN | 0399245472 |
Charley Maplewood has never been one for parties—that would require friends, which he doesn’t have. But now that he’s turning ten—the big one-oh—he decides to throw a birthday party for himself, complete with a “House of Horrors” theme. Of course things don’t work out as he plans....
| Author | Tricia Springstubb |
| ISBN | 0061986356 |
Fox Street was a dead end. In Mo Wren's opinion, this was only one of many wonderful, distinguishing things about it.
Mo lives on Fox Street with her dad and little sister, the Wild Child. Their house is in the middle of the block—right where a heart would be, if the street were a person. Fox Street...
| Author | Michael Ferrari |
| ISBN | 0385737157 |
Born to Fly tells the story of eleven-year-old tomboy Bird McGill. Ever since she can remember, Bird has loved flying in small propeller airplanes with her mechanic dad. When the local airstrip is turned into a military flight school, Bird is in heaven. But when a young Japanese American student named...
| Author | Lynne Rae Perkins |
| ISBN | 0061870900 |
The Newbery Group has been referencing this book for a couple of months now, so I thought I should read it. Since it is a road trip book about a teenage boy I was thinking it would have some Kerouac inspiration/feel to it. To the author's credit, she does know how to create characters that are warm, interesting,...
| Author | Carl Deuker |
| ISBN | 0547279817 |
Through the eyes of a distinctly non-athletic protagonist—a fat high school journalist named Mitch—veteran sports novelist Deuker reveals the surprising truth behind a mysterious football player named Angel. When Angel shows up Lincoln High, he seems to have no past—or at least not one...
| Author | Kekla Magoon |
| ISBN | 1416978046 |
Set in a suburb of Las Vegas, Ella and Zachary, called Z, have been friends forever, but Z has always been “the weird kid” in their class. He collects stubby pencils, plays chess, and maintains an elaborate –and public– fantasy life, starring himself as a brave knight. Z’s games were okay back...
Though he thinks of himself as a cowboy, Tommy is really a bully. He's always playing cruel jokes on classmates or stealing from the store. But Tommy has a reason: life at home is tough. His abusive mother isn't well; in fact, she may be mentally ill, and his sister, Mary Lou, is in the hospital badly burned...
| Author | Natasha Friend |
| ISBN | 0439853508 |
I would ideally give this book 2.5 stars since it really does fall somewhere between "it was okay" and "I liked it." This was my least favorite Natasha Friend book probably because it seemed the least realistic to me. I didn't really think there was a lot of character development so Evyn seemed really flat...
| Author | Jewell Parker Rhodes |
| ISBN | 0316043079 |
From New York Times bestselling and award-winning author Jewell Parker Rhodes comes a heartbreaking and uplifting tale of survival in the face of Hurricane Katrina.
Twelve-year-old Lanesha lives in a tight-knit community in New Orleans' Ninth Ward. She doesn't have a fancy house like her uptown...
