Here's a booktalk for a recent favorite with the sixth graders I see. Published by Orca Currents, it is perfect for middle schoolers who don't much like reading.

Soouueee! Soueeee!
The boy made a loud hog-calling sound and everybody in the class laughs and looks over at the one student who isn’t laughing. His name is Dan, Dan Hogg.
Kids have been teasing Dan Hogg about his last name since, oh, about kindergarten. They also tease him about his bushy hair, his thick glasses, his buck teeth, and the fact that he is so darn skinny.
But the name teasing got a lot worse when their teacher announced the field trip. Their whole class is going to visit a traditional farm. Sadly, it isn’t a dairy farm or a wheat farm, no, their class is going to visit a farm where they raise pigs – a hog farm.
The two hour bus ride is torture:
“Ewww – don’t sit by me, Pigboy.”
“Oink, oink, oink. Dan Hogg. Dan Hogg.”
“Oooooh -- we’re going to see how Dan’s relatives all live out on the hog farm.”
… and things like that.

By the time they arrive at the farm Dan has a bloody nose; somebody shoved his face into a bus window. So you know he’s glad to get off that bus to meet the farmer and see the farm.
Now Dan expected the farmer to be some old guy wearing overalls and a straw hat, scratching his beard and chewing on a piece of hay. But that’s not how he looks at all. This farmer is young, with a shaved head and tattoos on his knuckles. Cool! Dan didn’t know farmers looked like that.
Well, normally they don’t.
In less than an hour Dan will find himself climbing onto the roof of the barn wearing only his underpants, trying to figure out how he can save his classmates, his teacher and the real farmer from a grisly death at the hands of a gun-toting madman.
The only one who can save them is Dan Hogg – the PIGBOY.

Pigboy, by Vicki Grant

Vampires!

This year we added bucket-loads of books about vampires to the collection. Here's one series that should easily sink its fangs into a few middle schoolers:

A hundred and fifty years ago biologists and archaeologists traveled around the world looking for new species of plants and animals and looking for secrets and treasures from ancient kingdoms. They filled museums and books with what they brought back.
But sometimes they brought back a lot more than that.

Jack is a boy about your age. Not as big as a grown man, but old enough to look after himself – good thing too, because he’s lived almost his whole life on the streets.
A lot of the time he hangs out around the river docks. Ships from all over the world arrive there and sometimes interesting things happen.
Once, just after the sun had gone down and the lingering light had faded away, a dark ship on the last of the incoming tide docked there near Jack along the river.
Jack watched and waited – and then he gasped. A huge cloud of flying things poured out of the ship – flying high into the sky over the city. Dark-winged creatures like bugs? No, much bigger. Like birds? No, like bats.
Before he could catch his breath, a tall man with a silver-capped walking stick walked up the gangplank and off the ship. Jack could see at once that this was a gentleman, a rich man.
And then finally, one more thing left that ship: a skinny boy a little younger than Jack. A boy who looks pale and scared, and like he hasn’t eaten in a month.

The boy sits down and tells Jack his story – a tale of science and legend and monsters.
He and his dad had been on a trip to Mexico to study new species of plants and animals and to look for secrets and treasures from ancient kingdoms. The local people there told them to beware, but the scientists thought they knew more. They ignored the warnings and dug into an ancient tomb, and out of it came bats, vampire bats that drink human blood, that can turn other people into vampires and who can switch back and forth from human to bat form and back again just like that.
The winged creatures Jack saw leave the ship are those very same hideous vampire bats, and now they’re in the big city of London, looking for fresh blood and new victims.

Watch your neck! It’s the start of the Vampire Plagues!
Vampire Plagues: London, 1850, by Sebastian Rook.