Those of you hanging around the Internet this weekend, especially on Twitter, were probably inundated with the hashtag #womeninfiction. It seemed that all of the librarians, authors, and publishing people I follow came out of the woodwork to tweet and retweet about their favorite female fictional characters. Many of those were characters remembered with strong fondness from the reader’s formative years, years where they were reading what we would now classify as Middle Grade fiction.

There is a certain magic to the books we read as middle grades students. Magic in the books themselves, which are often delightfully well written and unapologetically tackle complex issues of the self, family, society, and our place in it. Also, magic in the reader. This is the time when many readers take on ownership of their own reading, form preferences, explore and have adventures through the characters on the page. It was visible in these tweets. Here are some of my favorites: