Middle Grade Fiction for May

Over the past couple of weeks I've interviewed some authors of new middle grade novels for my blog, Book Q&As with Deborah Kalb, and I thought I'd share a little of what they had to say!

M.M. Downing and S.J. Waugh are the authors of the new novel Berlin Breakout, the third in their Adventures of the Flash Gang series, which takes place in the 1930s. They said: "It is important to repeat that what surprised us when writing these books is how timely this story is. The rise of fascism, the fracturing of alliances, authoritarian rule, job insecurity, the widening gap between wealth and poverty in the 1930s is a harbinger of some of the struggles we see today. We began this tale imagining a period romp of orphans and car chases and murky alleys. It became so much more."

Heather Murphy Capps' novel is called The Rule of Three. She said of her character Wyatt, "When I created Wyatt’s character, my goal was to tell the story of a person who has a genetically inherited trait that is a result of familial trauma. However, it was important to me to show the whole person, not just the trauma—which is why we get a chance to see Wyatt’s friendships and his love of baseball. At its heart, this is a story about family, friendship, and baseball as much as it is about trauma."

Aliza Layne is the author and illustrator of the graphic novel Beetle & the Chimera Carnival, the second in a series. I asked if she worked on the text or the illustrations first, or both together, and she said, "Both simultaneously! Because I’m both writing and drawing, it might be easier to think of the situation like a movie where I am able to do a vast number of jobs. I have to think like a screenwriter and put the story together; I have to think like a director and stage the shots; I have to act as the characters by drawing their performances, and I have to think like the art director and style the characters and design the locations. It’s a lot of work, but it really is fun."

Happy reading!

--Deborah Kalb