Middle Grade Marvels – Books Full O’ Wonder: Middle Grade Book Club Announcement

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Hello Hello! How are you?

DRUM ROLL PLEASE! You have absolutely NO IDEA how happy I am to be posting about this today! You already know that I’ve been co-hosting the Hype-A-Thon Readathon with Noly from The Artsy Reader since last September, and a few months ago, we started talking about making a book club and she told me that both her and Holly from Holly Loves Books had been thinking about it for ages but never got around to it! And that is how our BABY aka Middle Grade Marvels – Books Full O’ Wonder, a book club where we read Middle Grade books, was born! 😊

WHAT, WHY & HOW

Middle Grade Marvels is a Book Club idea that we came up with a while ago. Actually, Noly and Holly had this idea on the back burner for a lot longer and it sort of kicked off when we all came together because we were so excited we all loved Middle Grade books and really wanted to share our love with everyone! It also took us such a long time to come up with a name for our book club but then it sort of happened and the motto just came along and we all love it so much!

One of the reasons we really wanted to have a MG book club was that we all love reading MG books and we feel that they don’t get the attention they deserve and are very underrated, especially on Book Twitter and Bookstragram. We really hope we can change this trend with our book club and hopefully get loads of people on board to spread the MG book love and also find some great recommendations! MG books are so important, they are full of magic and wonder (see what we did there?), they have fantastic plot lines and a lot of the time come with a very important lesson or moral and we think that everyone should read MG books more because they are awesome, right? We also need to find some happiness right now, so this is maybe a great way to start, and for all the parents out there, why not read all these great books with your kids?

Like every other book club, each month we will be reading a Book of the Month, there are no specific themes or prompts, so you can either join us and read the BOTM or you can pick something from our Recommendations list, something from our Similar Books list, or something from your own shelves! There really is no obligation to read the book we pick and you can read as many or as little as you want! There is so much more info about our book club that we want you to know, so let’s break it down!

BOOKS OF THE MONTH

So, each month Holly, Noly, and I will either be picking one book as our book of the month, or we will ask you to tell us what book(s) you are really excited to read and we will have a poll to decide. All of the books of the months will be Middle Grade books. As I’ve said, you don’t need to read the BOTM, we just thought that it would be a really great way to motivate everyone! We will also be having a Twitter discussion chat for the BOTM for those of you who don’t mind being in a chat and want to talk about the book!

Alongside our book of the month, in a few days, we will be posting a Recommendations list of all of the MG books we’ve read and recommend to others, you can always pick your book of the month from that list! OR, next month, when we decide on our June BOTM, we will be working on compiling a Similar Books list of books that are like our BOTM so that you can pick one in case you’ve already read the BOTM, don’t want to read it or can’t get your hands on it. We probably won’t have read any/many books from the Similar Books list, but we will make sure that they have the same type of plot or themes and of course, we will most likely want to read them as well. Again, there is absolutely no obligation for you to read the BOTM that we pick, you can read whatever you want either from our lists, from your own shelf or personal recommendations, it’s really up to you!

This book club is still fairly “in the making” and we haven’t got much sorted out yet (but we do have a VERY long list aha!), once we get everything sorted, we will have a sign-up sheet pinned to the Middle Grade Marvels Twitter account where you can all sign up through a sign-up form, but please bear with us, because it doesn’t exist yet aha!

The books of the month don’t have to be hyped books, new releases, they only have to be MG, so comment all your recommendations on our posts, on our Twitter and Goodreads when they go up and on your social media platforms using the #MiddleGradeMarvels hashtag!

SOCIAL MEDIA AND INTERACTIONS

The first thing I think we all agreed on was a group chat. You don’t have to participate in the monthly group chats, but if you do, it would be so great to have you! Each month will be a new group chat so we don’t get the books mixed up and we will try to figure out how you all want to organise your reading so we can minimize the spoilers aha! If you are not able to get your hands on the book of the month or don’t want to read it for whatever reason (which is totally fine), you can pick any other book and still interact with us on Twitter by using the #MiddleGradeMarvels hashtag! We still need to create our Twitter account but this should be going up today or tomorrow, and more info will be available in the Twitter bio and in the pinned tweet that we will put up!

I’m already in a Book Club on Goodreads and I told the girls how fun this was, so we all decided that we were going to try (oh lord please don’t let us fail), to create a book group where you can all join and in which we will be posting the lists, polls for each BOTM, discussion threads and maybe even some fun games in the coming months! We figured that not everyone likes Twitter or Goodreads, so you can pick which platform you prefer and join us on whichever works for you!

A LITTLE SNEAK PEEK OF OUR RECOMMENDATIONS

We are going to be compiling a Recommendations list over the next couple of days so you can all find some great books that we’ve read and loved, but we thought it would be a nice addition to tell you what our favourite MG books were!

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Noly chose Ban This Book by Alan Gratz, Holly chose Ghostcatcher (#3 Potkin and Stubbs) by Sophie Green and I chose The Girl Who Drank the Moon by Kelly Barnhill! I’ve only read my pick, so I can’t vouch for the other two, but you absolutely have to read my pick, and also because I trust the girls’ recommendations too, you ABSOLUTELY have to read their picks too!

If you’ve already read these books, don’t worry, our Recommendations list will be quite long (I’m sure) and there will be loads of books to choose from each month if you don’t fancy the BOTM, and don’t forget about out Similar Books list starting in June!

MAY BOOK OF THE MONTH

Since we haven’t yet got the Twitter and Goodreads accounts up yet (oops), we thought that we would announce the Book of the Month we have already picked for May! You don’t have to read this, you can wait to see our recommendation list, or you can pick something from your shelves. Remember, May is a test run to figure out what works and what doesn’t, what you like and what you don’t like, and the announcement for each Book of the Month will come earlier once we get a hang of things!

So, for May we all quite easily decided on Tilly and the Bookwanderers (Pages & Co #1) by Anna James and we are so excited to read it! Please don’t worry if you don’t have this book and can’t get your hands on it, feel free to read what you want, but we hope that you will join us!

Keep your eyes peeled for the Twitter account and Goodreads group going live, as soon as we have the sign-up form we will be pinning it to our Twitter feed! Remember to use the #MiddleGradeMarvels hashtag when talking about the book club and please come join us and have fun reading some great Middle Grade books with us!!!

That’s all for now (I think, I hope I haven’t forgotten anything), I hope you enjoyed this post and will check out Noly’s and Holly’s posts too! See you soon, stay safe,

Ellie xx