Next Page is a newsletter written by senior correspondent and book critic Constance Grady. She covers books, publishing, gender, celebrity analysis, and theater. Read her latest work on our site.

The promising race to get kids reading again

The next generation of middle-grade books doesn't look like Harry Potter. Good.

Something happens to kids when they’re about 9 years old. Before then, they’re voracious little bookworms, with most of them saying they read for fun at least five days a week. After their ninth birthday, only 35 percent still do.

Experts call this phenomenon “the decline by 9,” and they spend a lot of time trying to figure out how to stop it. They talk up and cherish the books that break through: the Harry Potters and the Percy Jacksons, which got so many kids to keep reading through those danger years and which sold so well through millennial and Gen Z childhoods. Publishers keep looking for new books compelling enough to keep kids away from their screens and glued to the page.

But for the past 10 years, books for kids ages 8 to 12 (known as middle grade) have been selling less and less.

“It had been happening for maybe a decade, very very slowly,” said Joanne O'Sullivan, a children's book author and reporter for Publishers Weekly. What had been a gradual slope got dramatically worse in 2020. And in the years since the pandemic, publishers have shut down multiple middle-grade imprints, culminating in it happening twice this year.

No one in publishing is entirely sure why kids books stopped selling, but there are two major theories. One says that children are no longer reading as much as they used to, because they are worse readers than previous generations were. The age group that used to happily devour Harry Potter is now distracted by iPads and YouTube shorts, so they never developed the ability to sit down and focus on a printed page. Their reading scores, which started falling in 2014, tell the tale.

The other theory says that the kids aren’t the ones who changed — publishers are. Starting in the 2000s, middle-grade books began getting long, with the average going from 174.5 pages in 2006 to 290 in 2016. According to this narrative, publishers flooded the market with books too difficult for their target audience. Kids responded by tuning out.

Whichever theory is true, the fact remains that all those ravenous 8-year-old bookworms depend on middle-grade publishers to keep on reading after they turn 9. The publishers who sell these books have built massive businesses on their ability to supply kids with exciting, addictive stories. If they’re failing, what will kids turn to for entertainment instead?

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ON THE SHELF 📚

I want a book like Greta & Valdin. It's kind of about siblings and family but mostly just slightly messy people living their lives.

What’s really lovely about Greta & Valdin is its gently offbeat sense of humor; I frequently catch myself laughing when the memory of Greta looking up from her comp lit reading and exclaiming, “Oh, god, this man’s just bloody jumped out the window because of hyperinflation!” pops into my head. Luckily for you, this year has been a very good one for quirky comic novels that deal with families and everyday mess. I have three recent releases for you to put on hold at your library forthwith.

Madeline Cash’s Lost Lambs is a slightly affected, very funny story about a suburban family whose three daughters are all courting disaster in different ways. Here’s how you know if you’ll like this book or not: it opens with an extended rant about the “gnat situation” at the local church, and thereafter, every time you see the letters “nat” in other words, they are preceded by a silent g. You will either find this running bit exhausting or rejuvegnating.

Maria Semple, who is still best known for her 2012 novel Where’d You Go, Bernadette (also worth reading), recently put out the screwball Go Gentle, about a woman who works as a live-in Stoic philosopher and ethicist for the family of a billionaire. Go Gentle has an unwieldy plot that never quite coheres, but it’s so much fun to watch Semple go careening from middle-aged apartment covens to high-stakes art heists that it is worth your time regardless.

Finally, Andrew Sean Greer, who won the Pulitzer for his 2018 comic novel Less, graced us this year with the effervescent Villa Coco, about a young gay man living with an Italian contessa on her Tuscan estate. (Surprisingly, this novel, too, features an art heist. The key to a good book in 2026, perhaps?) It is a sweet-natured and effortlessly charming read, and at its heart is the found family bond between the contessa and her nameless, judgmental, devoted narrator.

Want more book recs? Ask Constance here.

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OFF THE SHELF 📝

Bookish browsing

I talked with video game expert George E. Osborn about his new book on the political potential of video games.
At Defector, David Hollingshead writes in defense of the humanities.
Part of growing up is forgiving Ma in the Little House books. At the New York Times, Sadie Stein does her justice.
Do you have a literary deadly sin?

Happy reading,

Constance

📲 For more thoughts from Constance Grady, follow her on X, Threads, or BlueSky.

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