Teddy and Kim have been together, well, it seems like forever. So when one day, just after lunch in their senior year of high school, Teddy asks a question that Kim isn’t prepared for, it throws everything off. And to a freshman named Phil Spooner who witnesses what appears to be the end of Kim and Teddy, he has to tell someone. Who better than Kim’s best friend who just happens to be walking by, moments later. That was all it took for the grand saga of what happened to end Kim and Teddy to start making the rounds and rounds and rounds of the school.
At first people can’t believe it, but then, everyone decides it is time to pick sides. Even the teachers get involved because these two were the “it” couple and who doesn’t have an opinion on what went wrong! As the whole situation gets larger and larger involving sayings, and even what people are wearing, pretty quickly people lose sight of the fact that no one seems to actually be asking Teddy and Kim what happened. And frankly, Teddy and Kim are honestly wondering the same thing. What did happen?
That’s Not What I Heard by Stephanie Kate Strohm is a fun and often funny look at what happens when our expectations get off track and how sometimes everyone has just a little too much to say about things that really, aren’t their business!
Recommended for grades 7 and up.
He doesn’t really think it is creepy, even if his best friend Charlie, disagrees. He looks at it more as gaining life skills. After all, if he does someday want to work for the police or as a private detective, he will need to know how to watch people. So, no, he doesn’t really think he is stalking people, more just observing them…without them knowing!
They are all mystified to be receiving letters asking them to come to the island owned by their grandmother. After all, she cut her own children out of her life years before any of them were even born. So why now, after twenty years has Mildred – as all three of her grandkids refer to her – asked them to visit her on her resort island? Milly, Aubrey and Jonah are all clueless. However, each of their parents is happy for them to become aquatinted with their rich grandmother. After all, maybe she’s had a change of heart and will put them in her will again. 
don’t have the power, or the money or the standing in society. Because their blood is Red. Not Silver. The Silvers have special powers that can make people do things, or even control elements. Mare tries hard to make up for the fact she knows she is a disappointment to her family. After all, she has no special skills. She basically steals things since no one has picked her to be an apprentice. And that means she’ll follow in her three older brothers’ footsteps and head off to war once she turns 18, which is coming up fast. Still, at least her younger sister has a skill and she will be able to save the family, or so Mare hopes.
the United States because she knows if she goes back to Mexico, there are people there who will kill her. Her brother, Emiliano has been hiding at a ranch in Texas after being rescued from near death in the desert. But he has a very important phone – a phone that Sara has been risking her life for, and now Emiliano’s life – because it contains information that could bring down a whole human trafficking smuggling ring being run in the United States.
Stephen has some good friends, but lately, his best friend Dan, has been hanging out with his cousin, Chad. Chad, for lack of a better word, is pretty much a jerk and seems to be mean on purpose to Stephen. Any time Chad is around, Stephen just wants to leave. So when a bunch of Stephen’s friends hang out one day, and Chad starts to challenge Stephen to do something he isn’t comfortable doing, Stephen wonders if his friendship with Dan will survive since his parents always say people will pick family over friends.
oper doesn’t like her “like that” after that disastrous discussion last summer, but it doesn’t mean she can just turn off her feelings. Still, she has to pretend, right? After all, she doesn’t want to lose Cooper as her best friend, and it will totally mess up their group of four friends. But two of those four are going away for the summer, leaving just Cooper and Abby. Abby and Cooper. Okay, she really needs to stop thinking anything will change.
Things are changing in India in 1857. But it turns out, not fast enough for Meera. She longs to learn to read and write like the boys her father teaches, but she knows that isn’t something that her father approves of for girls. In fact, Meera is getting ready to go off and be with her husband, a boy named Krishna when she turns 13 in just a few days. She has been married to him since she was a little girl, but will go join his family now that she is older. Her parents believe in a fringe practice called sati, where if a husband dies before the wife, the wife will follow him in death by sacrificing herself on his funeral pyre. Meera was young, but she still remembers when her aunt had to do that after her uncle died. Still, she is young and her husband is as well, so she isn’t worried about this.
Beauty, as she used to be called when she was little, knows she doesn’t like life in town, even if her two sisters do. She struggles with the expectations of what life might and probably will be like for her. Basically, finding someone to marry, setting up a house and then having children. But, does she really want that? Or should she just accept that is what happens when you get older and grow up. Like how she used to be called Beauty, but now goes by Yeva, since that is a more proper name. Yeva still longs for those old days with her father when she would go hunting with him in the woods. But since her father became a respectable merchant and moved the family to the city, those days seems like such a distant memory for both of them.
teacher. One that Will was not going to let slide by, and of course, it meant that she got in trouble for it and ended up in detention. The worst part for Will was the fact that Harriet heard what the coach said to Ruby, and just gave him a pass. But that isn’t very surprising for Will because she knows Harriett is a total suck up to all the teachers at their elite high school in Australia.
Books in the Middle: Reading for Middle School 