The Middler

By Kirsty Applebaum

Beyond the mysterious boundary of eleven-year-old Maggie’s town, the Quiet War rages and the dirty, dangerous wanderers roam--a gripping debut for fans of The Giver, Pax, and Orphan Island

“The Middler held one marvelous surprise after another every time I turned a page, leading to a most unexpected ending! Readers are going to love this book!” —Jennifer A. Nielsen, New York Times–bestselling author of The False Prince and A Night Divided

Maggie lives in orderly Fennis Wick, protected from the outside world by a boundary. Her brother Jed is an eldest, revered and special, a hero who will soon go off to fight in the war. But Maggie’s just a middle child, a middler, often invisible and ignored, even by her own family.

When she chances upon a wanderer girl in hiding, she decides she wants to be a hero like her brother and sets out to capture the intruder. But once Maggie peeks past the hedges of the boundary for the first time, suddenly everything she’s ever known about her isolated town gets turned on its head. . .

In her debut novel for young readers, Kirsty Applebaum crafts a gripping story of resistance, forbidden friendship, loyalty, and betrayal.

"I thought I'd almost reached my fill of dystopian novels, but Kirsty Applebaum has rebooted the genre. The plot pulls you along . . . [and] there is a touch of Harper Lee's Scout [in Maggie]." —The Times

• Language: English
• Publisher: Macmillan Publishers
• Release date: Apr 14, 2020
• ISBN: 9781250317346

Kirsty Applebaum

Kirsty was born in Essex and grew up in Hampshire. She has had a wide variety of jobs including bookselling, railway re-signalling, picking stones off conveyor belts, putting lids on perfume bottles and teaching Pilates. She now lives with her husband on top of a hill in Winchester.

Reviews for The Middler

[bookwren · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Fast-paced, dystopian adventure. Middler Maggie learns to feel her fear and do the right thing. Her strong voice and actions carry the plot.

[oldandnewbooksmell · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Maggie is a middle child, a middler, trying her hardest to be heard in a town where only the eldest borns are valued, since they're who goes off and fights in The Quiet War. One day she meets Una, a wanderer, someone she's been told her whole life is "dirty, dangerous, and deceitful". The duo quickly become friends though and Maggie begins to question everything she's ever known to be real.

The voice of Maggie was gripping and helped me turn the pages. She's a fighter that, though she was scared, would talk herself up to become the hero she wanted to be (though not in the way she thought she would).

The ending felt a little rushed and I wished I could see a bit more of Una, but overall the book was a nice read for a cloudy Sunday. This book is a middle grade level book and was pretty fast paced for me. I read it in two settings in one day. It would be a great book as an introduction to young readers into the dystopian genre.