When one day his eyelid swells up and won’t go down, Ross can kiss being normal goodbye. Because it turns out he has cancer in
his eye, or right behind his eye and in order to keep his eye, he will have to go through a lot of radiation treatments. He has two best friends, Abby and Issac. Abby is a solid friend and sticks by him, but Issac basically ghosts him. And trying to fit in, in middle school is hard enough, but when you have to do strange things to keep your eye, it is hard to make new friends.
To make things even worse, someone is making some really mean cartoons that are circulating around the school – ones that are about Ross and he has no idea who is doing them. Sometimes his one bright spot is actually going to his radiation treatments, where one of the technicians is super cool and starts Ross down a path that he never saw for himself.
Wink by Rob Harrell is both humorous and serious by turns. Ross has to learn to navigate his treatments, his diagnosis, his family and friends as well as school. It is a lot for any 7th grader! Especially when all he thinks he wants is to be normal, almost to the point of being invisible.
Recommended for grades 6 and up.
Avery is just trying to get by. Her half sister, Libby, took her in two years ago when Avery’s mother died. Libby and Avery share a father, a father neither of them has anything to do with, so it was super nice of Libby to take on the responsibility of a 15 year old teenager. As much as Avery appreciates all that Libby has done for her though, she can’t help wishing Libby would get better at picking boyfriends. Or rather, get better at not returning to the same dead beat abusive boyfriend. Which is what Libby tells Avery when she gets home after a pretty lousy day at school. That the old boyfriend is back to the current boyfriend. Avery decides she would rather spend the night in her car than deal with Drake.
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.
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. 
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.
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.
So it is a real thing. Not being able to write. And R.M. Haldon’s got it bad. So bad that maybe he needs to think outside the box to get something written, anything written to finish up his epic fantasy series, Swords and Shadows. After all, he has fans waiting, and waiting and really waiting for him to tie up all those loose ends. So why can’t he, when the first books came so easily to him?
Books in the Middle: Reading for Middle School 