Middle School Books
For readers who notice things. Question things. And discover they can do more than they imagined.
Growing up means beginning to see the world differently—and realizing that sometimes the adults don't have all the answers.
Sara Madden's middle-school novels are written for curious readers navigating friendship, family, identity, loss, courage, and the complicated question of who they want to become.
Some stories begin with a girl who needs a friend. Some with a boy who finds a code he isn't supposed to understand. Others begin with the stories a family leaves behind.
But they all ask young readers to do more than watch what happens.
Notice. Question. Decode. Remember. Choose.
Because young people aren't waiting to become interesting someday.
They're already living stories that matter.
Who We Are: Heroes & Bullies
What makes someone a hero when nobody is watching?
Thirteen-year-old Missy Button thinks she knows.
Her grandfather was a hero.
He left behind stories of courage, sacrifice, adventure—and a granddaughter determined to live a life worthy of them.
But Missy's best friend C.E. doesn't think he's heroic at all.
He's the kid who gets picked on. The kid who doesn't fight back. The kid who would rather read Superman comics than discover whether there's any courage hiding inside himself.
As Missy navigates grief, friendship, family secrets, bullies, first crushes, and life in the wonderfully peculiar town of Ogdenville, she begins to discover that heroes aren't always the people whose names end up in history books.
Sometimes they're grandparents.
Sometimes they're best friends.
And sometimes the person who needs convincing is you.
Originally written by Sara Madden for her beloved grandfather and inspired by stories from her own family, Who We Are: Heroes & Bullies is a deeply personal novel about the examples we inherit—and the choices that determine what we do with them.
Because courage isn't something you're born with.
It's something you choose when the moment asks who you are.
The Red Balloon
Sometimes being seen is the beginning of everything.
1967. Twelve-year-old Tabitha notices the new girl before anyone else seems to.
Trudy lives across the way. She's quiet, small, wears suspenders and a fedora, and keeps most of her belongings packed in a cardboard box. She's learned something children in foster care sometimes learn far too early: don't get too comfortable. Don't expect to stay. And don't give people more of yourself than you're prepared to lose.
Tabitha doesn't know how to reach her.
Until she finds a red papier-mâché balloon.
Suspended on the laundry line between their bedroom windows, the balloon becomes a place for folded notes, questions, secrets, and the beginnings of a friendship neither girl expected.
But friendship cannot protect Trudy from everything. As Tabitha begins to see the assumptions, cruelty, and systems surrounding her friend, she discovers that noticing someone isn't enough.
Sometimes you have to stand beside them, too.
Tender, quietly powerful, and ultimately hopeful, The Red Balloon is a story about friendship, identity, foster care, belonging, and the extraordinary difference one person can make simply by saying:
I see you. You matter. I'm still here.
The 108 Code
Three faiths. Three continents. One impossible code.
Samson Caldwell believes everything means something.
Patterns. Numbers. Codes. The strange journal sitting on his archaeologist mother's desk.
Especially the fact that his mother has disappeared.
Across the world in Kyoto, twelve-year-old Sakura Tanaka-Singh has been searching for her own missing mother for three years. Sakura is blind, fiercely independent, and able to recognize patterns Samson cannot perceive—not because she sees less of the world, but because she experiences it differently.
Their mothers were searching for the same thing.
The 108 Code.
Hidden across sacred places, ancient texts, mathematical sequences, symbols, sounds, and centuries of human belief is evidence of something impossible: a boundary between worlds is failing.
And someone is trying to break it open.
From Utah caves to Kyoto temples and the Golden Temple of Amritsar, Samson and Sakura must decipher clues left by the people who disappeared before them. But the deeper they travel into the mystery, the clearer one thing becomes:
The code was never meant to be solved by one person.
Because sometimes the answer isn't about seeing what everyone else sees.
It's about discovering what only you can notice.
Part mystery, part puzzle, part globe-spanning adventure, The 108 Code invites readers to crack the ciphers, follow the patterns, and solve the clues alongside its heroes.
Think you can break the code before Samson and Sakura do?