
Middle grade authors, who write for readers ages 8 to 14, have had a dreary time of it lately. “Middle Grade Sales Continue to Slip,” Publishers Weekly reported in July, underlining the message with a chart showing middle grade with the biggest sales decline among all kids’ book categories.
In a May article, Slate described the middle grade category as “in free fall,” adding, “It’s the only sector of the industry that’s underperforming compared to 2019. There hasn’t been a middle-grade phenomenon since Dav Pilkey’s Captain Underpants spinoff Dog Man hit the scene in 2016.”
“Storm clouds have gathered over the land of middle grade literature, and the forecast is uncertain,” the blog From the Mixed-Up Files … of Middle-Grade Authors, whose respected roster includes Portland author and bookseller Rosanne Parry, warned in March.
West Linn middle grade author Waka T. Brown is a bright spot amid the gloom.
Brown’s first book, a middle grade memoir titled While I Was Away, came out in 2021. It recounts her experience as a middle schooler plucked from her Kansas home and set down in Tokyo for several months with a grandmother she barely knew, because her parents wanted her to improve her Japanese. The book was an Oregon Book Award finalist and landed on the New York Public Library’s Best Books for Kids 2021 list.
Brown’s second book, a middle grade novel titled Dream, Annie, Dream, came out in 2022. Annie tries out for her middle school play and is thrilled to get a role. Then the other kids start saying she was cast only because of her race – she’s Asian, and the play is The King and I, set in Thailand. The book won an Oregon Book Award.
Brown went in a new direction with her third middle-grade novel, The Very Unfortunate Wish of Melony Yoshimura, which came out in 2023. In this contemporary fantasy, inspired by a Japanese folktale, a girl frustrated by her parents’ protectiveness manifests a shape-shifting demon who gradually takes over her life. The book, which drew comparisons to Neil Gaiman’s Coraline, won an Oregon Book Award.



Brown already has a fourth middle-grade novel, Rick Kotani’s 400 Million Dollar Summer, slated for release in February. It’s set in Oregon and stars a young baseball player – her first male protagonist. As a mother of three boys, “I’ve sat through hundreds of hours of baseball games now, and so I know a lot about it without even having played it,” she said.
Meanwhile, Brown is excited to attend – and take part in – her first Portland Book Festival on Nov. 2. She’ll read her new picture book, Perfect, inspired by the Japanese art of kintsugi, during a storytime slot. And in a collaboration between the festival’s owner, Literary Arts, and the Portland Jazz Composers Ensemble, a Nov. 1 concert titled Playing With Words will feature a composition by saxophonist Tim Willcox that was inspired by The Very Unfortunate Wish of Melony Yoshimura.
Like many authors, Brown grew up reading voraciously, an experience she credits to having had a pre-internet childhood. Later, she got into movies and started writing screenplays. But “it’s infinitely harder to get a movie made than to get a book published,” she said. “I was like, you know, I’d like to have more than five people read something that I wrote. And it’s worked out for me.”
Brown had the idea for While I Was Away while she was writing screenplays – she mentioned it to a studio executive. “I would say out of all my books, it’s my most all-ages type of story,” she said. “But since the protagonist is 12, I felt like that’s who it should be written for first and foremost.” Her agent and publisher supported the idea of positioning her in the middle grade market.
“I found that I really liked it, because there are a lot of coming-of-age issues that I think are really highlighted during that age,” Brown said. Plus, her three sons were at that age. “I would see them and their friends, and it was almost like a revisiting of that time when I learned to love books and those themes that drew me in.”
While Melony has drawn plenty of young fans who split along the lines of “it’s really not that scary” and “why did it have to be so scary,” Brown said her first two books have attracted more readers her age, including Asian Americans.
“I was surprised by that,” Brown said. “But then once I thought about it, yeah, that makes sense, because when we were growing up, we didn’t necessarily have that” – “we” being Asian Americans, and “that” being Asian American representation in books. “So it’s almost like a catching-up.”
Brown is pleased to see adults reading middle grade in general, noting Barnes & Noble’s 2022 decision to cut back on stocking middle grade hardcovers in favor of best-selling trade paperbacks. “Up to 80 percent of middle grade hardcovers bought by B&N were routinely returned unsold to publishers,” the bookseller’s CEO, Jamie Daunt, told Publishers Lunch.
On top of that, Brown said publishers are calling for shorter books and more graphic novels for kids in the face of the “Decline by 9,” as industry watchers refer to the decrease in kids’ reading by that age.
“So I think what I’d love everyone to remember for middle grade is adults can read middle grade, too,” Brown said. “There’s some really great stories in middle grade.”
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