Name: The Middle Moffat
ISBN: 9780152025298

Eleanor Estes

Follows the adventures and misadventures of ten-year-old Jane Moffat living with her widowed mother and three siblings in their new home in Cranbury, Connecticut, in the early twentieth century.

The Middle Moffat

Sarah Sammis

The Middle Moffat is the sequel to The Moffats and is a Newberry Honor book. It follows Jane Moffat's attempts to make something of herself as she's tired of just being the middle child.

Each chapter is a different adventure of Jane Moffat: she plays basketball, gives an unusual organ recital, and confronts the local fixit man. Her main goal though in this book is making sure that her 99 year old neighbor (a Civil War vet) make it to his 100th birthday. Jane likes him because he calls her the "mysterious Moffat."

Although the overall tone of The Middle Moffat is upbeat the book does cover a number of tough subjects: poverty, death in the family and war. Although the book was published during WWII, Jane Moffat most likely living through WWI.

The Middle Moffat was illustrated by Louis Slobodkin and his drawings highlight a lot of the humor of the book much as William Steig's drawings do for Mr Blandings Builds His Dream House.