The Remarkables, by Margaret Peterson Haddix, was sitting in the middle grade section of our library on an open shelf. The teaser phrase on the cover reads, “There’s a mystery next door.”

There was something compelling and a little spooky about the cover art. With a little hesitation, because I don’t like to be spooked, I grabbed it.

It took several weeks to get to – the reading list is so long these days. But it was SO. GOOD.

Good Middle Grade Lit has the distinction of little or no violence, sex, or language, but excellent storytelling. YA can walk that line, too, but the last two YA books I read leaned into violent content and other ideas that made me squirm so that I didn’t even know how to write about them, nor did I want to share them on the blog.

The Remarkables, in comparison, was a true pleasure read. The storytelling was excellent. I especially appreciated that the adults in the story were not one-dimensional peripheral necessities, but real characters who had a role to play.

The story plays with time, explores friendship and bullying, sibling dynamics, parent/kid relationships, and being different. Several of the books I’ve read recently (like the YA lit I mentioned) has been really weird about religion, with edgy and progressive biases and themes, and has made the parents in the story out to be dicks.

Doing this to parents in stories is convenient because it allows us to hate them and justifies the behavior of the kids, however extreme that may be. It makes it easier for the kids to be the heroes and have adventures. Maybe it’s because I have 1.5 teenagers at home right now that I’m more sensitive to parents being portrayed as lame and inadequate.

The kids in this story have adventures, but it isn’t at the expense of their family life, nor did the author have to vilify the parents to make us love the kids. The characters are lovable because they are human. The family dynamics are real, believable, and relatable. The story balances that little bit of spook with lots of regular life that kids and adults alike will recognize echoes their own, but with a little extra magic.