Middle Grade is my favourite category of fiction to write and to read. People who know MG get it, I think: it has room for earnestness and wonder in a way that isn’t always popular. MG protagonists don’t have the experience and autonomy that’s usually taken as read in adult fiction. It’s more complex than fiction for younger kids, but not as gritty as YA and NA get to be. It’s not arch or sarcastic or cool like the cool kids, and to me that makes it the most genuine and the most fun to write.

Ages eight to twelve is that glorious and horrible time before you can control much of your day to day, but the world is opening up around you, and you’re starting to see what having choices is going to mean for you. You see the world you’re in, and the future feels very big, hazy, and far away, but also frighteningly close and moving in fast. It’s that point right on the edge of something huge, and anything might happen next. I think that’s really interesting.

Our lives are so circular. We start out as ourselves with no understanding of barriers, and as we try to find our way in the world, we’re constantly chipping off the weird bits of ourselves that don’t fit or feel too embarrassing to keep. So for a while, sometimes a very long while, we’re a sort of halfway version of ourselves, partially built out of the expectations of other people and culturally-inflicted shame that we’ve picked up along the way. I guess we’re all still a bit of that as adults. It’s hard to shed the fake stuff once you’ve taken it on. We’re ourselves, but also a constructed version of ourselves, the person we think we’re supposed to be. But after a while, we get tired of carrying around all that scaffolding and infrastructure and missing pieces. What’s it for, anyway? So we start dismantling it. As we get older, if we’re strong and confident and lucky, we get to go back to being the person we were in the first place, that kid we were in the middle grades.

To me, that’s MG fiction: stories set in the liminal space between childhood and adulthood when kids are still the truest and most unfettered version of the person they’re about to become. Middle grade readers are just as smart, sensitive, thoughtful, observant and aware as any young adult, and I think they deserve stories that acknowledge that. Great MG has all the nuance and moral complexity of any adult story. It’s just from an eleven-year-old’s vantage point. Middle grade kids live in the same world as everyone else, and they are just as smart and thoughtful, often with a very strong sense of right and wrong. They just have less context, experience, access, power, and autonomy, and usually have fewer resources to act. Everything an adult is going to be is in a middle grade kid. All the potential future selves are in there, too, so the scope for stories is endless.

And that’s why I love MG.