I received really helpful feedback last year alongside a rejection of Bury’em Deep. The agent said (I paraphrase) that she really liked the story, but wouldn’t represent me because she didn’t know an editor who was looking for it. She went on to say that middle grade was an exceptionally difficult market at present; acquiring editors were extremely picky, and she didn’t have the right contacts for upper middle grade space adventure.

I appreciated her candor. Frankly, I think her position is a good one—if she doesn’t know where or how to sell a work, she’s not the agent for that work. She remains the only agent (in over five years of on and off querying) who has given me such clarity in her response.

But all of that left me wondering: what the heck is ”upper middle grade” fiction? Have I been using the wrong term for my story this whole time?

There were several basic structural distinctions between Middle Grade (MG) & Young Adult (YA), prior to the emergence of the New Adult genre (NA was first coined in 2009, slowly gaining more widespread acceptance as a category over the following decade). My attempts to answer my question (“what the heck is upper middle grade fiction”) start with those distinctions. I don’t know how much things have shifted since NA became better known and more popular (though I suspect NA has bled into the rise of romantasy).

Let’s start with intended readership: MG is meant for readers 8-12 years old, YA is meant for readers 12-18 years old. “Intended” matters here, given that many YA books are bought and read by readers who are older than 18 (frequently significantly older). MG may have less appeal to older readers, and is more often described by what it is not: it is not a chapter book or an early reader, it lacks profanity or sexual content, it rarely has violence or avoids graphic violence. This makes it difficult to create a positive definition. Many MG books are set in our own world with limited genre elements, and may focus on social struggles or experiences of loss (like death, as in Old Yeller or Where the Red Fern Grows).

YA encompasses a broader scope of topics, and may include violence, familial dysfunction, sexual content (usually limited in nature, with an emphasis on romantic feelings and resulting social complications), or any number of other issues that make a story “inappropriate” for the MG genre. YA was first used as a term by librarian Mary Scoggin in 1944 (thanks Wikipedia), but it was a description used by a librarian to sort existing literature (written prior to that categorization!) into groups to be recommended to readers of a certain age. 

It’s worth noting that our culture’s longstanding definition of MG has strong sheltered-white-upper-class-American overtones. Many children aged 8-12, both in the US and elsewhere in the world, face experiences that would not be acceptable content for a MG novel. MG as a category is a construct, defined by the publishing industry (especially their marketing wings) and those who recommend books to readers. The same is true of YA. YA’s extensive readership outside its purported target audience is a good reminder of that.

An example: the excellent book Code Name Verity was published in the US as YA. In the Australian market, where it was first published, it was released as historical fiction (which it definitely is). What makes this book YA in the US, but historical fiction in Australia? Was one publisher more right than the other?

My current personal distinction between MG and YA is rooted in the hero’s relationship with their home and family. Both MG and YA often follow the hero’s journey. MG introduces complication and drama but ultimately allows the young and changed protagonist to return to a beloved home and family environment. By contrast, a YA story’s drama and complication often places the hero in opposition to their initial home environment—unlike the MG protagonist, a YA protagonist’s growth culminates in a new home-like situation which they have found or created or changed for themselves. Put another way, MG allows a hero to go out and adventure in the world and then come home (There and Back Again, as it were) while YA says “your home is part of the problem.”

By my definition, Bury’em Deep is correctly assigned to (upper) middle grade. “Upper” because, well, there’s a little more violence, there are societal ethical issues to wrestle with, and it’s written for a slightly more advanced reader. But maybe I’m doing this wrong.

What if my definition is defective? Is Bury’em Deep more like YA? I’ve had enough adults tell me they love it, maybe I’m miscategorizing it because the main characters are young.

Part of my problem is that I didn’t stay with “middle grade” fiction for very long when I was little. My reading was all over the place. If MG is what kids 8-12 years old are reading, then my MG was full of Dragonlance books (and anything else by Margaret Weis & Tracy Hickman), Animorphs, Brian Jacques, Roald Dahl, Bunnicula, Susan Cooper, Alan Dean Foster, Piers Anthony, Philip Pullman, T.A. Barron, Eric Flint, Robert Asprin, David Drake, Andre Norton, Tolkien, Frank Herbert, Harry Harrison, Larry Niven, S.M. Stirling, Lloyd Alexander, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Jules Verne, Garth Nix, Steven Brust, Alexandre Dumas, and R.A. Salvatore (among many others). I was all over the place.

Some of those are certainly aimed at younger readers (the Animorphs series, Jacques’ Redwall series, the Bunnicula books, Lloyd Alexander’s Prydain books, etc.). But many others, while accessible to my reading level, weren’t ‘kid friendly’ at all. To further confuse things, some of these authors wrote both ostensibly kid-friendly books and decidedly NOT kid-friendly books… and I read all of them.

What I really wanted at that age was adventure fiction. One way or another, I found it. 

While it might not feel like it should be MG, adventure fiction often fits the genre requirements of MG. Here’s our checklist: adventure fiction uses the structure of the hero’s journey; adventure heroes often return to a beloved home; adventure fiction doesn’t prioritize sexual or romantic content over action; and neither the sexual content nor the violence in most adventure fiction are graphic. These things often hold true even when the characters are older and the stories handle more adult themes. The Princess Bride is a decent example.

For me, adventure fiction made an easy bridge from books written for a younger audience to those written for more advanced readers. I didn’t draw boundaries between the different adventure stories I read, I used them as stepping stones. I went from Gary Paulsen’s Hatchet to K.A. Applegate’s Animorphs to Dragonlance (with some detours). From there, I was off to the races.

Let’s return to categorizing Bury’em Deep. It has a hero’s journey, and features a beloved home that is imperiled without being the source of the story’s central problem. There is serious emotional content without sexual or romantic content. There is some violence, and grievous harm occurs off-screen. The violence that occurs on-screen is serious and palpable, but it isn’t full of bloodshed. The main characters wrestle with social and ethical issues. Finally, the main characters are young teens and kids.

Bury’em Deep is absolutely adventure fiction. I feel confident of that. It also doesn’t violate the requirements of MG fiction—but I’m pretty sure we could find other books with older main characters from my list of authors above that fit the same description.

Is that the key issue? Bury’em Deep has young protagonists. Is that what makes a story MG?

That feels like a bad answer.

The more I think on it, the more I think that “upper middle grade” is an even less helpful descriptor than “middle grade.” I think “upper middle grade” says more about the age range of the protagonists than it says about the story’s content or the age range that will be interested in the story. Maybe I should stop using the term. 

Yes, I want kids to read Bury’em Deep. Yes, (precocious) kids were the intended audience. Yes, Bury’em Deep meets the category requirements for the MG genre.

But at the heart of it Bury’em Deep is an adventure story. It’s an adventure story about kids. It’s meant for whoever the heck wants to read it, and it’s written for precocious young readers and older ones too. Maybe ‘written for all ages’ secretly also means MG.

In conclusion, yeah, I might keep saying “upper middle grade,” but I’ll say it because I think the publishing industry expects that descriptor. My heart isn’t in it.

I have a whole bunch of other thoughts about adventure stories and emotional intelligence and gender and the publishing industry, but that will have to wait for another day.