What makes it middle grade?
I think the key element of what makes a middle grade story middle grade is less the content or the tone or anything else I used to think it was. Middle grade contains multitudes. What if the distinction is just in who the protagonist thinks they are, and who they identify with? Whose shoes they put themselves in? Middle grade protagonists understand themselves as kids and don’t identify with adults. I think that’s the whole thing. It’s so simple.
In YA, teens look at adults and imagine themselves as those adults making different (and better) choices. They’re often wrong about how easy that’s going to be, or they’re missing information or experience to know why those adults aren’t making the choices they want them to, but they see a future where they take over from adults. They can picture that transition. I think that’s the critical shift. In middle grade, the gap between the protagonist and the adults in their life is so vast they just don’t make that leap. Adults are a different kind of animal altogether to the middle grade protagonist, and there’s no clear path from point A to point B. Like the gosling who can’t fathom that they’ll one day be a swan: they can imagine being a bigger gosling, but no parts of them match up with the qualities of a swan, and their imaginations can’t get there.
Not that a middle grade protagonist can’t feel sympathy or even empathy for an adult in their lives. But I’d say a middle grade protagonist doesn’t put themselves in the shoes of an adult and imagine how it would feel for them or how they would act differently. I think they’re still more in an adults are like that, and I am like this place.
I think that might be the whole thing, right there.