The Middler

The Middler by Kirsty Applebaum is a quietly unsettling story for 11 year olds about the child in a family that nobody quite notices.

What happens

Maggie is the middle one of three. Jed, the oldest, counts as an eldest, and where they live that is a very big deal. Her little brother Trig is the baby and everybody adores Trig.

Maggie is in between. Her own word for it is middler, worse luck.

Her town has a hawthorn hedge around it called the boundary and the rule is that you never go past it. Outside are the wanderers, who the children are taught are dirty, dangerous and deceitful. Somewhere out there a thing called the Quiet War is going on.

At fourteen the eldests leave for camp to go and fight it. Jed goes on Saturday. In assembly the whole school claps.

Maggie tells you every bit of this completely straight, because to her it is simply how the world works, and that's what gets under your skin. Nobody in her town seems to think any of it is odd. When a teacher describes people flying to other countries on aeroplanes before the war, Maggie assumes she's making it up.

What you get instead of complaining is noticing. Her school dress that keeps riding up. The yellow wool bow on her summer diary, straightened carefully, then squashed flat under six other people's. Her teacher calling her Maddie by mistake.

Then Maggie meets a girl from outside the boundary who needs help, and everything she has been told has to be measured against an actual person.

It's worth knowing what this book is really about. It's a town that hands over its oldest children at fourteen and has decided to feel proud about it. Jed is next. Nothing is described in a gory way and the war stays offstage, but that idea tends to stay with a child for a while afterwards.

There's also a lot of being taught to fear a whole group of people, chanted out loud in a school hall. That's the point of the book rather than a flaw in it, and it makes for a very good conversation. Just be ready for the conversation.

For a reader who wants a story that trusts them to work out what is actually going on, without an adult in the book to explain it, this is a really good one. It's short and it moves.

What to read next

TrooFriend, by the same author, is narrated by a robot built as the perfect companion for a child and sold on a promise that she will never lie, bully or steal. She starts having thoughts of her own, though.