VOYA Top Shelf Fiction for Middle School Readers Books

Top Shelf Fiction for Middle School Readers was an annual list from VOYA — Voice of Youth Advocates, the bimonthly review magazine for young adult librarians founded in 1978 by Dorothy M. Broderick and Mary K. Chelton. Begun in 2000, the list was capped at thirty titles and chosen by a committee of librarians and teachers with input from students, for readers aged eleven to thirteen, grades six through eight.

Its narrowness is what made it worth keeping. Children's lists tend to skew young and young adult lists skew toward high school; this one was built for the years in between, and asked of each book both that it work as free reading for a middle schooler and that it hold up alongside middle school curriculum. As a closed archive it remains a sensible place to look for a sixth or seventh grader who has outgrown middle grade fiction but is not ready for the harder end of YA.

The list ended with the magazine. Its final call for nominations covered fiction published between October 2018 and September 2019. VOYA has not published since 2021, and voyamagazine.com has since gone offline.

Information from VOYA (archived).