by Elfrieda (Freddy) H. Hiebert 
Every holiday season, I receive a carefully curated set of books from a friend—a ritual that has become one of my most anticipated gifts as an educator. When this year’s selection arrived, I was stopped in my tracks. Not because of their literary merit, though that’s considerable, but because they made me think differently about what we’re doing in middle school classrooms.
My epiphany was this: Middle schoolers don’t need more scaffolding and exercises. They need stories that treat them as the thinking, feeling, aware human beings they actually are. What’s remarkable is how clearly this emerges—even in brief summaries of the books.
Middle schoolers don’t need more scaffolding and exercises. They need stories that treat them as the thinking, feeling, aware human beings they actually are.
The Diamond Explorer (Yang, 2025) presents Malcolm, a Hmong American boy perceived by his white teachers as “quiet” and “slow.” Yet through Yang’s careful dual narrative—moving from adults’ limited perspectives to Malcolm’s own vivid interior life—we discover a deeply intelligent boy, a gifted collector of family stories and seeker of his place within his culture. His spiritual journey toward understanding his ancestors’ shamanic legacy becomes a meditation on identity, grief, and what it means to truly see a young person.
The Gate, the Girl, and the Dragon (Lin, 2025) offers magical realism grounded in Chinese folklore. Jin, a stone lion spirit, begins as a reluctant guardian who’d rather play sports. When his careless mistake traps him in the human world, he must grow into responsibility alongside two unlikely companions. The novel respects young readers’ capacity to hold complexity: characters who are flawed at first but capable of genuine transformation.
El Niño (Ryan, 2025) ventures into territory that speaks directly to adolescent experience: grief, the collapse of identity, the desperate search for meaning when the world doesn’t make sense. Kai, a competitive swimmer, loses his sister Cali to the sea. What follows is not a neat processing of grief but something far more authentic—a blurring of reality and myth, where a mysterious sea creature and his sister’s library book suggest something deeper is happening.
How to Talk to Your Succulent (Persico, 2025), a stunning graphic novel, puts something often missing from middle-grade literature at its center: the discovery that talking and communicating are not the same thing. Adara discovers she can speak to plants, inheriting her mother’s power—but this magical ability becomes a mirror for her own inability to communicate with her grieving father. The succulent Perle becomes a profound metaphor: both Adara and Perle are suffering in an unsuitable environment, both need care, both are afraid to ask for help.
What These Books Understand About Middle Schoolers
Each of these books rests on a fundamental assumption: young adolescents are capable of genuine understanding—not the understanding we extract through worksheets and comprehension questions, but the understanding that comes from encountering complexity, loss, and transformation through narrative.
When we give middle schoolers books like these, they generalize. A reader engaging with Malcolm’s struggle to find his place discovers something about belonging that transfers to their own experience. They don’t need the teacher to extract this theme. They know it when they read it.
They focus on what matters. Adolescents are not the scattershot learners some interventions suggest. When a story speaks to something true about human experience, they focus with remarkable intensity. They notice what Kai’s relationship to swimming tells us about identity. They see how Adara’s silence mirrors her father’s.
Middle schoolers are also aware of their own capabilities and shortcomings. When we offer them books that grapple with real complexity, we acknowledge their awareness.
Rethinking Our Approach
I’ve seen the magazine and newspaper headlines about the current generation of teenagers’ need for foundational skills. I’ve attended the webinars about this. Much of this work is well-intentioned. But I wonder if we’re approaching the problem backward. What if the intervention isn’t more targeted skill work, but better stories?
When we look at middle schoolers through the lens of skill gaps and intervention protocols, we often miss something essential: they are experiencing a profound expansion of their capacity for abstract thinking, moral reasoning, and emotional sophistication. This is not a time of deficit. It is a time of extraordinary development.
Our job isn’t to fill gaps through exercises. Our job is to provide mirrors and windows—stories that reflect who these young people are becoming and stories that show them worlds beyond their own experience. Our job is to trust that they will generalize, that they will recognize truth when they encounter it.
The Diamond Explorer by Kao Kalia Yang (2025). Dutton Children’s Books.
The Gate, the Girl, and the Dragon by Grace Lin (2025). Little, Brown & Company
El Niño by Pam Muñoz Ryan (2025). Scholastic Press.
How to Talk to Your Succulent by Zoe Persico (2025). Tundra.