More Friendship Stories for Middle Schoolers

With breathtaking descriptions of nature and its ultimate phenomenon, the eclipse, Every Soul a Star is a powerful and humorous story about dealing with change and discovering one’s place in the universe.

New York Times bestselling author of The Candymakers, Wendy Mass weaves an intricate and compelling story about strangers coming together and establishing unlikely friendships. 

A Newbery Honor Book. Jacqueline Woodson is the 2018-2019 National Ambassador for Young People’s Literature.

The day D Foster enters Neeka and her best friend’s lives, the world opens up for them.

Suddenly they’re keenly aware of things beyond their block in Queens, things that are happening in the world—like the shooting of Tupac Shakur—and in search of their Big Purpose in life.

When—all too soon—D’s mom swoops in to reclaim her, and Tupac dies, they are left with a sense of how quickly things can change and how even all-too-brief connections can touch deeply.

Newbery Medal Winner. Winner of the Boston Globe–Horn Book Award for Fiction. New York Times Notable Book.

Shortly after a fall-out with her best friend, sixth grader Miranda starts receiving mysterious notes, and she doesn’t know what to do. The notes tell her that she must write a letter—a true story, and that she can’t share her mission with anyone. It would be easy to ignore the strange messages, except that whoever is leaving them has an uncanny ability to predict the future.

If that is the case, then Miranda has a big problem—because the notes tell her that someone is going to die, and she might be too late to stop it. 

Newberry Honor Winner. 

Elizabeth George Speare’s survival story is filled with wonderful detail about living in the wilderness and the relationships that formed between settlers and natives in the 1700s.

Now with an introduction by Joseph Bruchac.

When her best friend since the third grade starts acting as though Debbie doesn’t exist, Debbie finds out the hard way that life can be a lonesome place.

But in the end the heroine of this wryly funny coming-of-age story — a girl who lives in a house covered with stuff that is supposed to look like bricks but is just a fake brick pattern — discovers that even the hourly tragedies of junior high school can have silver linings, just as a house covered with Insul-Brick can protect a real home.

It has been over twenty years — and more than two million copies, eight foreign editions, and a popular Miramax feature film — since the world was introduced to this powerful story of a unique friendship between a troubled, oversized boy and the tiny, physically challenged genius who proves that courage comes in all sizes. 

Only Gary Paulsen could write such a wonderfully funny story of friendship. Harold Schernoff, 14-year-old science whiz and social nerd, has a theory for every problem, from dating, to bullies, to making money, to sports, to how to buy a car when you’re underage. 

Things are fairly normal in Hard Pan, population forty-three. But to Lucky, fairly normal means fairly boring, and she’s restless. Just in the nick of time, she meets a potential new best friend named Paloma, who happens to be visiting Hard Pan with her uncle, a geologist.

Before she knows it, Lucky gets stuck in a well, meets up with a wild burro, discards something she didn’t know was precious, does something unexpectedly cruel, and learns a couple of the secrets of the universe.

The year is 1954, the place is Missouri, and twelve-year-old Rosemary Patterson is about to make history. She is one of the first African American students to enter the white school in her town. Headstrong, smart Rosemary welcomes the challenge, but starting this new school gets more daunting when her best friend is hospitalized for polio.

Suddenly, Rosemary must face all the stares and whispers alone. But when the girl who has shown her the most cruelty becomes an unlikely confidante, Rosemary learns important truths about the power of friendship to overcome prejudice.

Ivy June Mosely and Catherine Combs, two girls from different parts of Kentucky, are participating in the first seventh-grade student exchange program between their schools.

The girls will stay at each other’s homes, attend school together, and record their experience in their journals. 

As the girls get closer, they discover they’re more alike than different, especially when they face the terror of not knowing what’s happening to those they love most.

If it hadn’t been for Lucas’s photographic memory, they might not have remembered the man. It had been almost a year since she and Kari noticed him copying a famous Rembrandt painting in the Minneapolis Institute of Arts.

But now in the National Gallery in London, they spot the same guy, copying another Rembrandt.

Then, when a never-before-seen Rembrandt painting is discovered in Amsterdam, the girls begin to suspect the truth. Convinced that no one will believe them without hard and fast evidence, the teenage sleuths embark on a madcap adventure to find the forger and bring him to justice.

Acclaimed author Gary Soto tells a fun and touching story about friendship, understanding, and the painful insecurities of being thirteen.

On his thirteenth birthday, Ronnie woke up feeling like a chimp—all long armed, big eared, and gangly. He’s been muddling through each gawky day since.

Now his best friend, Joey, has turned thirteen, too—and after Joey humiliates himself in front of a cute girl, he climbs a tree and refuses to come down. So Ronnie sets out to woo the girl on Joey’s behalf. After all, teenage chimps have to stick together.

In this novel, the author captures a time of innocence, wild beauty, and the growing violence that eventually changed the entire structure of colonial Africa.

The Mysterious Benedict Society is up against a new mission, significantly closer to home.

With only one week to find a captured Mr. Benedict, the gifted foursome faces their greatest challenge of all–a challenge that will reinforce the reasons they were brought together in the first place and will require them to fight for the very namesake that united them.

6th-grader Jessie Lou is deeply, madly, passionately in love with Conrad Parker Smith. Too bad she’s a tomboy with only one on-again, off-again friend, and hair so short you can’t spit on it. Too bad he’s the most popular boy in their small-town school.

But then Conrad hurts his leg and suddenly can’t keep up with his old pursuits anymore. Jessie Lou and Conrad start spending a lot more time together, but she can’t help wonder — is she just a substitute friend?

And will Conrad forget her when his leg brace comes off and he’s king of the school once again?