Firstly, to clarify, middle grade fiction in the US tends to be for 8-12 year olds, what we in NZ would say is upper primary grades, and/or lower intermediate. It’s more wide-ranging than we think from that age span. Check out the books that win the Newbery Award as a starting point.  A couple of years ago (2024), it seemed like the big news in the US was the downturn in middle grade fiction. It came up again in 2025, and I’ve heard similar things for 2026. So what might be going on here? Firstly, I went back to articles from 2024, such as this one - https://fromthemixedupfiles.com/the-middle-grade-slump/ - that talked about the big slump in sales. MG was down by 10%, and that was after slowing sales in previous years. However, some ‘experts’ said it was just sales returning to pre-pandemic levels. Was that actually true? Because along with the slump in sales came more book challenges in schools, MG books that were longer and therefore either less appealing to poorer readers or th...