Why Diverse Voices Matter in Middle Grade Fantasy Fiction

Middle grade fantasy fiction has broadened substantially in the last decade, and the change is not only about representation. When writers from different cultural backgrounds bring their traditions into the fantasy genre, the genre itself changes. New types of magic, new story structures, new relationships between characters, and new ways of handling time, memory, and inheritance all enter the form when the voices writing within it reflect a wider range of experience than middle grade fantasy previously included.

The young readers who encounter this expanded body of work are often meeting characters who look like them and come from communities like theirs for the first time in a fantasy context. That first encounter is consequential. A child who grows up reading only fantasy in which heroes come from one cultural background internalizes the message that the kind of stories in which magic happens are stories about other people. A child who reads fantasy with a range of protagonists learns that magic is something that happens in their own kind of story as well, and that shift affects how children see themselves as potential main characters of anything.

The folk traditions that writers bring into contemporary middle grade fantasy are often generations deep. West African spirit traditions, Caribbean jumbee stories, South Asian yakshi and rakshasa mythology, East Asian dragons and fox spirits, indigenous North American cosmologies, and the specific mythologies of African-American communities all carry forward into fantasy fiction now being written for ten and eleven and twelve year old readers. The writers working in this territory have often spent years thinking carefully about which parts of living traditions can appropriately be brought into fiction for young readers and which should be handled with different care.

The craft questions that expanded voices bring up are also useful ones for the genre. How do you translate a specific cultural concept into prose that a reader outside that culture can follow without reducing the concept to an exotic curiosity? How do you handle words and terms that do not have English equivalents? How do you let a reader inside a story world where the rules are different from the European fantasy rules they have absorbed from previous reading? These are craft questions every serious fantasy writer encounters, and the work of writers bringing non-European traditions into the genre has expanded the toolkit available for solving them.

Parents and librarians who are building middle grade fantasy collections for young readers now have a far richer catalog to work from than they did ten years ago, and the discipline of the work is to choose from the full catalog rather than defaulting to familiar titles. The benefit to young readers of encountering a broad range of voices is not only that they see themselves reflected if they come from underrepresented communities. It is also that they learn to inhabit imaginatively the perspectives of characters from backgrounds different from their own, which is one of the things that reading is for.