Middle Grade Must Reads – February 2026 (Part One)

Medusa Gorgon’s Bad Hair Day

• Written by Bethany Walker
• Illustrated by Katie Abey
• Published by Scholastic

There is one thing you can guarantee from a Bethany Walker book is laughter, lots of laughing out loud laughter.

And this book is no different.

Twelve-year-old Meddy Gordon has serious anger issues.

In this hilarious book for middle-grade readers, Meddy rants about family and friendships, using her diary as a way of letting out her anger and keeping her emotions in check. 

So far, so normal. You know the kind of frustrations with her self-absorbed sisters; problems with idiotic classmates; disagreements with pompous teachers; and, of course, her troubles dealing with the occasional flock of owls, swarms of snakes, or even the odd many-headed dog.

And then there’s the small problem of the snake hair that appears if she doesn’t control her anger…

You see, Meddy Gordon is not actually from the twenty-first century.

She is, in fact, a human from ancient Greece and she has made a powerful enemy.

Meddy G is MEDUSA and she just happens to have angered Athena,

the goddess of war. And what happens when the goddess of war is on the warpath? You have a bad day. A very bad day indeed.

It only took a couple of pages for me to be laughing.

I loved the way the author managed to produce this fun diary style look at Greek mythology. This is an interesting look at Hades, Medusa and Athena.

And this book will teach us all a lesson about the consequences of losing our temper. It was a great idea to have the character sent to a modern day secondary school. Bethany Walker just gets better and better.

The Invisibles

A magical kingdom. Four friends. One terrible mistake…

In the Land of Magic, four friends live a life filled with wonder. But there’s one rule: they must never set foot on the Island of Darkness. So, when one child does the unthinkable, they must all pay a terrible price – exile to Wasteland, the bleak world where only grown-ups live.

For Grace, this fate is particularly cruel. She wakes up with no memory of her magical home, or how she ended up here – and the only clue to her past is guarded by two hostile and mysteriously invisible children.

As Grace uncovers the Invisibles’ secrets, she must work out a way to return home, before Wasteland traps her forever…

This book is my book club read for September, and when I discovered that Susie Bower wrote this book I knew I was going to love it.

She is the author behind “The Dangerous Life of Ophelia Bottom”. Which was so good.

This is a MG book full of friendship, adventure, magic and mistakes.

This book is written from two different points of view, the first is a narrator who has lost her memory and the second is the character who started the chain of events.

All the main characters are children who on the whole are likeable,  and two of them are invisible.

The best thing about this book was Library Island- is there anything else better.

Felix and the Future Agency

. .

Felix Green has a talent – a talent that often gets him into A LOT of trouble – he can foresee the future. And he’s not the only one! When his latest prediction comes true, he soon finds himself whisked off to join the secret underground Future Agency. Here he starts to learn the tools to protect the country from the natural disasters set to befall it – summoning animal star constellations down from the sky, dream weaving and speaking to ghosts. When a dark spectre infiltrates the Future Agency, only Felix can unmask the culprit and save the agency from destruction . . .

What I like best about MG books is that they can take you anywhere in the world and nothing is impossible.

And this book is a true gem and it promises to be a series that will be one of the best ever.

So first a piece of history, this book is based on the Premonitions Bureau that existed in the UK in the 1960’s- and I loved learning more about the origins of that idea that sparked this book  in the Afterword. ( And who doesn’t love an Afterword).

This book is so fresh and completely different from any other book. This is fast paced , unique and hopefully there will be children all over Britain going to the underground hoping to find the Magic Mile. The world the author has created is truly something special and I would love to visit it.

So now onto the characters, we’ll start with the main character Felix, and what a main character he turned out to be. As a character he has the ability to carry the series, and there aren’t many book characters who can do this. The author has portrayed him so well, the love he has for his gran, the grieving he does for his parents, the way he’s like so many teenagers and not able to fit in at school. How he has no confidence and doesn’t believe in himself. But he also has this special ability to be able to see into the future.

He comes across as the type of character that you will spend the series rooting for.

The second character I really liked is Astrid, she is difficult to work out, but as the book comes to an end everything falls into place with her, there are no spoilers but I was pleasantly surprised where the author took this character and looking back it definitely makes sense.                                                                                                                

Each character, even if they only played a small part in the book, had their own strengths and weaknesses, and the book needed all these characters to gel together.

 Towards the end everything fell into place, all the clues made sense, but I can definitely see I was shocked at the cliffhanger at the end.

The writing is superb, and every sentence made me feel as if I was there, that I was part of the story.

So now let’s talk about the illustrations. For me there’s nothing nicer than a book with illustrations, for me it brings the characters and settings alive, and these really made the book.

I am looking forward to seeing more of these in future books.

This was a wonderful first book in a new series and I know it will get better and better,