I have recently become acquainted with the work of Christina Soontornvat, and I’m so glad that I have. I haven’t felt such a high level of enthusiasm for contemporary middle-grade fantasy in a while. I don’t intend that to sound quite as shady as it does; there are certainly a lot of great things happening in that space right now. However, I’ve been finding it harder and harder to find texts that strike the tone that I prefer for as a reader — which, I’ll be honest, had me feeling kind of nervous, since that also means I wasn’t often finding the tone I aim for as a middle-grade writer. A lot of recently published novels just seem so jokey. Quippy dialogue, snarky characters, and general zaniness within the fantasy world-building are everywhere I look. In some texts, these elements really work; in a lot of others, they leave me cold. And in all cases, they are just not at the top of the list of what I’m looking for in a reading experience.

I realize I’m coming across as the fun police here, so I want to be clear: I think humor is important in pretty much all storytelling, because it is so central to how humans communicate. In my personal life, humor is a massive component of my relationships. I honestly don’t think I could ever build trust with someone who doesn’t make me laugh. And I’m not talking highbrow stuff, either. Though I enjoy a dry scholarly in-joke as much as the next academic, I also spend my evenings trading pure nonsense with my fiancee. But humor is always contextual. It coincides with plenty of emotional states — including negative ones — but it has to fit the mood of the moment. If I’m reading a story in which characters are facing real danger, and I am meant to believe in the stakes of the situation, I’m not interested in who can say the snarkiest thing to the villain while they’re running for their lives. Even more than that, I want stories that give characters room to think and feel deeply without being scared that they’re about to lose my interest as a reader. I think that sometimes an over-reliance on punchlines — as opposed to genuinely character-driven humor — can be a mark of insecurity. If that seems harsh, it’s actually the gentler criticism of the two that come to my mind, especially for children’s literature, because the other option is that it may indicate a lack of respect for a young reader’s attention or interest. Middle-grade readers are not a monolith, and not all of them will drift away from a story if it turns serious. I know that I was a middle schooler who wanted, above all, characters who I perceived as real, fully fleshed people with, yes, senses of humor, but also flaws, struggles, and desires that could not be condensed to a couple of quips.

Enter the work of Christina Soontornvat, who, if this blog post were somehow to reach her eyes, is probably begging me not to drag her into my killjoy screed. Again, I want to make it clear that both of her books that I recently read made me laugh multiple times. They did so because I believed in her characters so deeply: I was rooting for them, and so when they made a joke or encountered something funny, I laughed with them, delighted by the moments of levity in their lives. I also feared with them, felt anger and sadness with them, and celebrated with them when they arrived at their hard-won triumphs.

The first of Soontornvat’s books that I read was A Wish in the Dark, which was essentially tailor-made to appeal to me specifically, since it is a middle-grade fantasy that is also a loose adaptation of Les Miserables. You may recognize the latter as one of my favorite things of all time. Set in and around the Thai-derived city of Chattana, A Wish in the Dark opens in a prison. The protagonist, Pong, and his best friend Somkit are orphans of prisoners; their late mothers’ incarcerations dictated that they must grow up within the prison walls until they are thirteen. Pong holds out hope that Chattana’s famed Governor, who can create light from thin air, will bring justice to his life. I probably don’t need to tell you that he is immediately disappointed. The Governor believes that it is impossible to change one’s station: since Pong was born into darkness, in darkness he will remain.

Pong is left with two choices: despair or escape. He chooses the latter. His life outside the prison is put in jeopardy when he steals food from a temple, but a kind old monk comes to his rescue. (You can just assume that I did a happy little dance at every major Les Mis moment.) After several years in the temple, circumstances bring him back to Chattana — and back into danger. Nok, a girl Pong’s age and the daughter of a perennially disgraced official, is sure that catching the long-lost fugitive will restore her family to the Governor’s good graces — and may just make up for the scandals surrounding her own birth. Yes, we’ve got ourselves a thirteen-year-old Javert in this book. Unlike her literary forbear, however, she survives her changing understanding of law and justice as she and Pong both come to realize that the Governor’s light is a prison of its own — and the people of Chattana deserve to be free.

Right after finishing A Wish in the Dark, I read The Last Mapmaker. This is another middle-grade aimed squarely at the middle school years; the protagonist, Sai, is twelve-going-on-thirteen, and I’d say that’s a perfect age for readers of this book. Sai is the daughter of a down-on-his-luck petty conman, and she is doing her best not to follow in his footsteps. She picks up apprenticeships in whatever respectable places she can worm herself into — but she’s about to face a problem that even her resourcefulness can’t solve. At thirteen, citizens of Mangkon receive their lineal chains, which show how many unbroken generations of upstanding contributors to society they have in their families. These links determine the kind of respect — and therefore opportunities — they will garner for the rest of their lives. Sai will not qualify for even one.

Sai is offered a reprieve when Paiyoon, the master mapmaker under whom she apprentices, is invited on a sea voyage on behalf of the Queen. Paiyoon asks Sai to join him, and she is thrilled. After years and years of war, Mangkon is finally enjoying a period of peace with all the various acquisitions it made to its empire along the way. This voyage is publicly pitched as an expedition of greater understanding of Mangkon’s territories. To Sai, this is perfect: she can abandon ship somewhere else where no one knows her origins and start a new life. But all is not as it seems: the purpose of the voyage is actually to “discover” more lands, including a great southern continent that may or may not exist, to add to the empire. Both the risk and the reward are great; if the crew manages to find this mythical land, then there is a five-link lineal in it for Sai. But between a new stowaway friend, a charismatic mutineer, and her old master’s warnings about the ravages of imperialism, Sai will need to make a lot of hard choices about what kind of person she really wants to be.

From these synopses, it’s clear that certain themes capture Soontornvat’s attention: generational class/station, unjust hierarchies of power, and unlearning internalized prejudices. My own middle-grade manuscript, SKY CHILD, is fully about all of these things, so obviously I was delighted to find fantasy books for the same intended readership exploring them so well. I was most impressed by the way that Soontornvat allows her characters to straight up do the wrong thing sometimes. Tween-Javert Nok is obviously an example here: she spends a significant amount of A Wish in the Dark fully buying into the notion that the only way to be moral is to be lawful, even when the law dictates such injustices as Pong’s childhood imprisonment. I was even more impressed with Sai’s missteps in The Last Mapmaker, because she carries out some pretty major betrayals for what she completely recognizes as selfish reasons. She is not blind to the injustices of Mangkon, but she’s still trying to find a way to come out on top within it.

Of course, both Nok and Sai are given opportunities to course-correct, which I think is both appropriate for middle-grade and also narratively satisfying. I’m personally not into bleak, don’t-people-suck stories, whether they’re intended for kids or not. But for me, a lot of the satisfaction of characters choosing to be better comes from their previous failures to do so. Frankly, a lot of the contemporary middle-grade fantasy (and YA fantasy, if we’re being honest) I’ve been reading doesn’t give its characters that opportunity. I see a lot of characters who start their stories already knowing what they believe and then spending the narrative fighting for those beliefs — which is all well and good, but that’s only one kind of story. As a reader, I’m more interested in watching characters learn what they believe.

There’s a longer post about progressive didacticism in contemporary children’s/YA lit that I’m probably going to have to write at some point, but for now suffice to say that I found Soontornvat’s books a breath of fresh air. The politics of her work are clear — I mean, you can’t be wishy-washy about your ideologies in a Les Mis adaptation (unless you’re the BBC, and yes, I will die mad about it) — but her characters are specific people with specific backgrounds learning to live in their specific circumstances. Their personalities, interests, and relationships are shaped but not solely determined by these circumstances; they are individuals, not mouthpieces. Many of the characters have robust senses of humor but also respond realistically to their situations; no MCU-esque quippiness in moments of mortal peril here, which, thank god. Soontornvat clearly respects her young readers, and she gives them stories with staying power. These are characters and worlds worth thinking about after the book is closed. I wish I knew more twelve-year-olds to recommend these books to, but I’ll have to content myself with singing their praises here. Hopefully, Soontornvat’s success is a sign of great things to come in the middle-grade fantasy space. If you’ve read any middle-grade that you’ve particularly loved lately, I definitely want to hear about it! What do you look for most in a middle-grade story?