The Best of the Year…for Middle Graders Who Like to Laugh

One of the great things about working with middle-grade books is that there is never any shortage of really funny ones. It’s as though the audience is the last one writers feel truly liberated to let down their hair with, before moving on to the angst of the teenage years and the general dreariness of adulthood. This year is no exception, with writers finding humor in subjects as seemingly unfunny as a planned invasion, the end of the world, and poverty and prejudice—even the Fugitive Slave Act, as I’ve written before about Christopher Paul Curtis’ The Journey of Little Charlie.

In The Assassination of Brangwain Spurge, M.T. Anderson and Eugene Yelchin team up to tell the story of the title character, an elf ambassador who’s sent to spy on the goblins while unknowingly carrying a superweapon. In passages of prose from goblin host Werfel’s perspective and pages of wordless illustration from Spurge’s, the creators offer piercing commentaries on narrative and counternarrative and on unthinking cultural bias. It is also laugh-out-loud funny, as when Werfel realizes that Spurge has slipped their guards via a privy, prose capturing Werfel’s gabbling terror and pictures delivering a heaping dose (literally) of elegantly paced potty humor.

Roshani Chokshi sends her titular protagonist on a hero’s quest through a Hindu Otherworld in Aru Shah and the End of Time. The high stakes of this adventure are ever present, but so is Chokshi’s wit, developing a likable main character whose grandiloquent dreams are balanced by an earthy sense of self. On learning she is daughter of a deity, Aru reflects, “Apparently she herself was divine-ish, but whenever she looked in the mirror, all she noticed was that her eyebrows kept trying to join up. And it stood to reason that if you were even a little bit divine, you should not have a unibrow.”

And in Kelly Yang’s Front Desk, 10-year-old Mia Tang confidently helps out in the office of the Southern California motel her parents manage in exchange for Front Desk 2 a small apartment and a shockingly inadequate wage. On the same night her mom cooks lettuce (“Literally, just lettuce”) for supper, she helps out a fellow Chinese immigrant who has been fired for an extremely unfortunate misunderstanding of American greeting customs by drawing up a list of “American Phrases and Customs” that includes this important pithy advice: “Do not comment on how someone’s appearance has changed. I know it’s a compliment in China to say, ‘You look like you’ve gained weight!’ but trust me, Americans do not like it.”