Tuesday, January 27, 2015

The best middle school fiction of 2014!

It's been a tremendous pleasure to serve on VOYA magazine's Top Shelf Fiction for Middle School Readers selection committees for 2013 & 2014! We four librarians, plus one teacher, read over one hundred books and devoted many hours of time online and in person to discussing, sorting and ranking them. 

Our goal was to come up with at most 30 books that we could put forward as the best of the year for ages 11-14, bearing in mind literary merit, appeal to kids, relevance to curriculum, and the diversity of North American readers.

Apart from getting to read these books, another source of fun was recruiting student volunteers to review them for us! Without their honest feedback the list would have been sorely lacking.

Check out this year's list and last year's too, if you missed it! There's a bit of something in there for everyone. Some titles are appropriate for middle grade elementary readers, while those on the older end overlap with high school.

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