Funny middle grade books | Suzanne Stanmeyer

Here’s the honest answer: because kids deserve books that respect them.

Not books that talk down to them. Not books with lessons stitched into every page And definitely not books where the story grinds to a halt so a character can deliver a Very Important Message about her feelings.

Kids are smart. They’re funny, funnier than most adults give them credit for. They can handle real stakes and genuine scares and stories where things go sideways. What they can’t handle, what makes them quietly put a book down and never pick it back up, is being lectured. Or patronized. I don’t like it either.

I made a deal I made with myself (and my kids) when I started writing fiction. It would be fast, funny, and honest. The monsters are real. The danger is real. The humor is real. And the kids doing the saving? Also real. They’re regular kids who hate homework, love pizza, and sometimes fight with their siblings.

The Benedict Barnabas series is for kids who love a good scare with their laugh track. Think Goosebumps energy, but with a monster prison underneath a suburban cul-de-sac and a hero who would genuinely rather be building a model rocket.

Rose & Thorne is for kids who’ve ever looked at a sibling and thought: you are the most annoying person on earth, and also I would burn everything down for you. That’s brothers and sisters. That’s family.

Both series are clean — no content parents have to pre-read or quietly intercept. But they’re also written so that adults can enjoy them, too. Because that’s how good books are. Both are the kind of books that have a tendency to get smuggled into classrooms, passed around, and returned with dog-eared pages and a cracked spine.

Which is, truly, the highest compliment.