Books About Empathy for Middle School

A Newbery Honor Book * New York Times Bestseller * People magazine Best Kid’s Book * ALA Book for Young Adults * ALA Notable Book * and MORE!

Historical fiction with a hint of mystery about living at Alcatraz not as a prisoner, but as a kid meeting some of the most famous criminals in our history. Al Capone Does My Shirts has become an instant classic for all kids to read!

 Newbery Honor Book

Going to school and making new friends can be tough.

Going to school and making new friends while wearing a bulky hearing aid strapped to your chest? That requires superpowers!

In this funny, poignant graphic novel memoir, author/illustrator Cece Bell chronicles her hearing loss at a young age and her subsequent experiences with the Phonic Ear, a very powerful — and very awkward—hearing aid.

Newbery Honor Award Winner * ALA-ALSC Notable Children’s Book *IRA Children’s and Young Adults’ Choice * National Parenting Publications Award Honor Book * Junior Library Guild Selection

A boy who stutters comes of age in the segregated South, during the summer that changes his life.

He can barely say a word without stuttering — not even his own name.

So when he takes over his best friend’s paper route for the month of July, he’s not exactly looking forward to interacting with the customers.

But it’s the neighborhood junkman, a bully and thief, who stirs up real trouble in Little Man’s life.

Joe and Ravi might be from very different places, but they’re both stuck in the same place – school. Joe’s lived in the same town all his life, and was doing just fine until his best friends moved away and left him on his own.

Ravi’s family just moved to America from India, and he’s finding it pretty hard to figure out where he fits in.

Joe and Ravi don’t think they have anything in common — but soon enough they have a common enemy (the biggest bully in their class) and a common mission: to take control of their lives over the course of a single crazy week.

Eleven-year-old Melody is not like most people.

She can’t walk. She can’t talk. She can’t write. All because she has cerebral palsy.

She also has a photographic memory; she can remember every detail of everything she has ever experienced.

She’s the smartest kid in her whole school, but no one knows it.

Most people — her teachers, her doctors, her classmates — dismiss her as mentally challenged because she can’t tell them otherwise.

But Melody refuses to be defined by her disability. And she’s determined to let everyone know it… somehow.

Told with an abundance of dignity and a remarkable lack of rancor and venom, The Boy on the Wooden Box is a legacy of hope, a memoir unlike anything you’ve ever read.

The only memoir published by a former Schindler’s list child perfectly captures the innocence of a small boy who goes through the unthinkable.

Voted America’s Best-Loved Novel in PBS’s The Great American Read

One of the most cherished stories of all time, To Kill a Mockingbird has been translated into more than forty languages, sold more than forty million copies worldwide, served as the basis for an enormously popular motion picture, and was voted one of the best novels of the twentieth century by librarians across the country.

A gripping, heart-wrenching, and wholly remarkable tale of coming-of-age in a South poisoned by virulent prejudice, it views a world of great beauty and savage inequities through the eyes of a young girl, as her father — a crusading local lawyer — risks everything to defend a black man unjustly accused of a terrible crime.

Told with humor and breathtaking poignancy, Love and First Sight is a story about how we relate to each other and the world around us.

On his first day at a new school, blind sixteen-year-old Will Porter accidentally groped a girl on the stairs, sat on another student in the cafeteria, and somehow drove a classmate to tears. High school can only go up from here, right?

As Will starts to find his footing, he develops a crush on a charming, quiet girl named Cecily. Then an unprecedented opportunity arises: an experimental surgery that could give Will eyesight for the first time in his life.

Learning to see is more difficult than Will ever imagined, and he soon discovers that the sighted world has been keeping secrets.

It turns out Cecily doesn't meet traditional definitions of beauty -- in fact, everything he'd heard about her appearance was a lie engineered by their so-called friends to get the two of them together.

Does it matter what Cecily looks like? No, not really. But then why does Will feel so betrayed?

NPR’s Best Kids’ Books * Chicago Public Library Best Fiction for Older Readers * New York Public Library Best Books for Kids * Amazon’s Top 20 Children’s Books * ALA Rainbow Book List — GLBTQ Books for Children & Teens

Lily Jo McGrother, born Timothy McGrother, is a girl. But being a girl is not so easy when you look like a boy.

Especially when you’re in the eighth grade. Dunkin Dorfman, birth name Norbert Dorfman, is dealing with bipolar disorder and has just moved from the New Jersey town he’s called home for the past thirteen years.

This would be hard enough, but the fact that he is also hiding from a painful secret makes it even worse.  

One summer morning, Lily Jo McGrother meets Dunkin Dorfman, and their lives forever change.

National Book Award Winner

Caitlin has Asperger’s. The world according to her is black and white; anything in between is confusing.

Before, when things got confusing, Caitlin went to her older brother, Devon, for help. But Devon was killed in a school shooting, and Caitlin’s dad is so distraught that he is just not helpful.

Caitlin wants everything to go back to the way things were, but she doesn’t know how to do that.

Then she comes across the word closure–and she realizes this is what she needs. And in her search for it, Caitlin discovers that the world may not be so black and white after all.