Middle Grade Books for Adults To Help You Reconnect to Your Childlike Joy
Comfort reading for adults that is genuinely beautiful and healing.
When was the last time you posted up in the kid’s section of Barnes and Noble? If you’re a mom, you might be like, “Um, yesterday?” But I am not yet a mother! I am a 28 year old woman who, to the average passerby, has no reason to be in the children’s section of Barnes and Noble (However, it is one of the last few places outside the cafe that has seating to cozy up in with a book.)
It may or may not be a radical notion to you dear reader, but I love to read children’s and middle grade books as an adult woman. My best friend always says girls are born knowing exactly who we are and what we like and then we turn twelve and the world starts slowly taking those things away from us. Becoming a woman is finding your way back to who you knew you were at 3, at 6, at 9…before people constantly told you what was correct and interesting to like and spend your time on.
As an adult woman who is neither very old nor very young, the joy of childhood is a pastime and resource that is incredibly dear and central to my life. Because my friend is right. There is a time, however brief, where we live without doubt. Where we are our own best friends, and know instinctively and without question what brings us comfort and happiness. Now, when this gray, internal heaviness weighs on the hearts of grown-ups more so than it maybe ever has, comfort and happiness are in short supply. And going back to what we loved before we even cared why is such a magical pipeline of joy that costs very little and delivers very much. Rediscovering childhood joy through reading is the easiest, quickest pathway back to that little me elation.
I like to go to a Barnes and Noble in the middle of a weekday (when I won’t actually be getting in the way of any children or mothers.) I grab a little shaken espresso from the cafe. Maybe a cookie. And meander back to the pine wood bench seats and forest murals of the kid’s section. Stories were the axis on which my family spun. My happiest childhood memories are of my dad and I going to Borders after school. He would work and I would do my homework. Then I would devour every shelf of the kid’s section, savoring the sights and words like they were candy. I remember many hours lost in this guy:
I do the same thing now I did as a kid, sift through the shelves and pore over what catches my eye. These days I tend to gravitate towards the young reader and middle grade novels. I do like to appreciate the children’s books and take stock of things I might like to collect for my own child one day, but naturally those books are a bit short lived at an adult reading level (although this book is genuinely hilarious to me and I read it every time I see it on the shelves.)
Why Nostalgic Reading for Adults is So Healing
What I love about reading middle grade books for adults is that they are quite easy reads but not because they are silly or frothy like adult easy reads are. Youth authors create this elegant poetry within the confines of writing for a young mind and are often writing about the transformational magic of changing, growing, and learning: all of the nutrients of a life no matter how old you are. The stories transport me to all of the hallmark moments of my past: my first crush, my first failure, my first success, my first loss… The alchemy of these memories with the wisdom of age and the beauty of literature bring the most inspiring wisdom to my big kid heart.
These middle grade books are my favorite. Some of them I read as a kid and then again as an adult and some of them I read for the first time in my twenties. A couple are series so you’ll have something to pick up before bedtime for quite a few months. And if you have kids, you can share these with them!
Wings by Aprilynne Pike
The Perfect Fairy Book for Adults Who Love Magic
Do you remember that online web game Disney used to host, Pixie Hollow? What I wouldn’t give to return to the delight of playing Pixie Hollow in the computer room for hours. I still chase that high by indulging in the childlike delight of the Disney Fairies movies from time to time on a sleepy weeknight.
It may sound either weird or awkward or both to participate in such young stories as Tinker Bell or Winnie the Pooh (another personal favorite) on your own as an adult but I really can’t express how healing it is. Even if you didn’t have a childhood filled with cutesy stories like those, immersing yourself in innocent ideals and fantastical imagery that isn’t going to shock or traumatize you (as a lot of adult fantasy can) opens up this beautiful oasis of fun in your brain.
There are five books in the Wings series and the story and characters aren’t so young that you’re bored by the simplicity. I have reread this series many times both as a kid and as an adult and it just transports you. To a time and place where magic is real and believing that doesn’t hurt. If you’re a big adult fae romantasy girlie, I cannot recommend this one enough.
The Plot: Laurel is a teenager experiencing normal teenage life, until one day she discovers she is actually a species of faerie and has been her whole life unknowingly. Now she must follow the path of magical dangers and mysteries while at the same time learning who she is and growing into herself as any young woman does.
The Vibes: Pixie hollow core, enchanted woods, Studio Ghibli- esque coming of age emotional arcs, young love in a quaint town, Old english fairy tales
The Beatryce Prophecy by Kate DiCamillo
A Medieval Fantasy Adults Will Adore
Kate DiCamillo is an OG and most of us have read or seen one of her stories by the time we get to adulthood (The Tale of Despereaux, Because of Winn Dixie.) But this book. This BOOK! I love this book so much. The Beatryce Prophecy came to me at a time when I was in the pits of despair, when I had no hope and no idea what in the world would really make me happy.
When I feel this way I go to the bookstore. At the time, I was in my childhood hometown and was able to go to the bookstore I would have gone to as a kid. I took my latte to the back and sat on those little benches, ruminating on my own despair when I found this book.
I realized reading it, you might stop being a kid but you really never stop figuring out who you are. You never stop changing. You never stop waking up one day and feeling like you know nothing. Beatryce’s story inspired me to keep going and make peace with the fact that life is always filled with questions and quests. Fortitude is a virtue we’ll never stop needing. And this book delivers it in such a cozy way.
The Plot: Beatryce is a young girl who cannot remember who she is and turns up one day at a fictional monastery in need of care. She turns out to have many fantastical tales in her mind, and to have a fantastical and dangerous legend she must piece back together along with the help of friends and allies she meets along the way.
The Vibes: Renaissance fairs, Robin Hood, medieval low fantasy, will-o-wisps, Canterbury tales-esque explorations of fate and the self
The Gallagher Girls by Ally Carter
The Boarding School Series Adults Keep Coming Back To
I, as a child of the Catholic Schooling System, lived my life in a plaid kilt from the age of five until the age of 18. There is a very specific nostalgia for boarding school settings when such is the case for a woman.
There is also this lifelong love affair I have with stories about how smart young women are. My same friend (she’s very poetic, I quote her quite often) always says she was smarter than she’s ever been at 15. And that is also true. There is no creature more intuitive, intelligent, and capable than a teenage girl. Perhaps that is why they suffer so much. To know is a burden and an invitation for challenge. And teenage girls know everything and nothing at the same time.
Personally I think Taylor would love this book.
The Gallagher Girls Series has it all: adventure, ingenuity, twists and turns, girlhood, young romance. And there are six of them, so the fun really carries on. It also just takes me back to that very specific and special time that is filled with so much passion and creativity in a woman’s life. It’s such a pick me up.
The Plot: The Gallagher Academy for Exceptional Young Women sits in the idyllic wooded hills of Northern Virginia, educating the world’s brightest young women; not only in 14 different languages, etiquette, and advanced sciences but clandestinely in the art of espionage. These girls have to learn to defuse a bomb before lunch and pick out first date outfits after dinner. World class threats and boy drama all in one day.
The Vibes: Constance Billard Prep from Gossip Girl, The Kingsmen but with teen girls, tween straight to DVD movies like Aquamarine and Wild Child, James Bond John le Carré level spy plots
Bonus in a similar vein: Winterborne Home (younger) and The Clique (less fantastical)
The Giver by Lois Lowry
A Dystopian Classic Worth Rereading as an Adult
The Giver walked so the Hunger Games could run. If you’re my age, this was probably on your reading list at one point or another or highly pushed at the school library. But at the beginning of 2025 I TORE through Sunrise on the Reaping in an effort to recapture that sweet, sweet fervor that was 2010’s young adult spec fiction. And I did! So when I finished Sunrise in two days I was coming down really hard.
And The Giver was available for free on Kindle Unlimited so I downloaded it and honestly? Loved it just as much if not more than the Hunger Games. Why is this a kid’s book? Are deep philosophical questions on the nature of governance and mankind’s struggle with good and evil kid’s themes? I guess it can’t hurt to start them young?
Naturally I’m not the first person to notice that The Giver is a genuinely amazing novel. It has a literal Newbery Medal. But reading it as an adult actually was deeply comforting. It has a lot of intrigue in its engine but at its core its about a person trying to understand the world and their place in it. And that’s something I really think we can all relate to these days.
The Plot: In a future utopian society where there is no pain and only placid emotion, a 12 year old boy receives his job assignment at his middle school graduation ceremony. He will be the new "Receiver of Memory” tasked with holding all of society’s collective memory and past emotion in order to be a sage advisor to the community’s leaders his whole life long. But truth, especially when you have never had to bear it, comes at a high cost.
The Vibes: The Golden Age of 2010s sci-fi books like Divergent and Hunger Games, Orwellian spec fiction universes, if Abnegation were a pinterest board, the deep pain and delight of being truly alive.
Ride your bike to get an ice cream! Write your first name with your crush’s last name over and over! Go to the library and learn how photosynthesis works! You are alive and you will grow every single day until you die and so you never really stop being a kid and that is the most beautiful fact of life if you don’t dwell on the pain of it all for too long!
That’s all for now folks! Hope you go forth and seek out childlike wonder in adulthood. Thank you for reading! 🫶🏻
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