At first, Afoma Umesi brushed off the comments. At her review website, Reading Middle Grade, a core part of her work was curating literary guides for elementary and middle schoolers. The commenters were, of course, adults—mostly parents and educators, keen on finding books that would delight the children in their life. The “middle grade” period, spanning ages 8 to 12, is thought to be the crucial moment when kids do—or don’t—become lifelong readers. And whenever Umesi posted a new roundup—say, “7 Tween Books Like Little Women” or “Middle Grade Books to Make You Cry”—at least one person would ask, Do you have anything for boys?
Her initial response was annoyance. “What do you think this is, the 15th century?” Umesi remembers thinking. Yet when she deliberately sought out such titles, they were unexpectedly scarce. “It was kind of like I was running into a wall,” she told me.
Out of curiosity, she compiled a database of 2026 releases and combed through them, analyzing their protagonists. Umesi found a surprising disparity: Girl protagonists outnumbered boys by a ratio of 2 to 1. Some categories, such as realistic fiction and mystery, were especially lopsided, she told me, with ratios of more than 3 to 1. “Girls are taking over!” she said, with a laugh.
Umesi’s survey offers just one snapshot of the publishing landscape. But others I spoke with in the children’s-book business shared the perception that today’s protagonists are predominantly female. The dearth of male protagonists, some told me, has made it harder to get boys in this age bracket interested in reading.
The idea that boys might prefer stories about boys sounds awkwardly retrograde, even to the boys themselves. Kids rarely state such preferences outright, Melissa LaSalle, the children’s-book buyer at Old Town Books, in Alexandria, Virginia, told me. Their parents sometimes will, albeit “in a slightly embarrassed way.” Of course, individuals might not connect to a book for any number of reasons: sense of humor, narrative stakes, cover art. “But the unifying theme that I hear resoundingly from parents of boy readers,” LaSalle said, “is, at the end of the day, there are not enough boy protagonists.”
To compensate, LaSalle has had to reach deep into the backlist, which comprises titles from past seasons. She’s stocked novels from my own tween years that I was startled to reencounter when, on a recent afternoon, we conducted an unofficial census of the shelves: Eoin Colfer’s Artemis Fowl series; Al Capone Does My Shirts, by Gennifer Choldenko. Despite these efforts, gender parity was a long way off. Even on these shelves, male main characters were an endangered species in virtually every genre—fantasy, realistic fiction, horror. “I will always keep hand-selling books with girl main characters to boys,” she said. “That does not address the problem, which is that boys are actually not seeing themselves reflected in contemporary stories.”
This development may come as a surprise. As recently as 2021, studies of children’s literature found that male lead characters were overrepresented; these surveys, though, used sample sets that either focused entirely on picture books or were heavily weighted toward them. Meanwhile, series such as Harry Potter, Percy Jackson, and Diary of a Wimpy Kid still reign supreme on the best-seller lists: “When you look at what sells the most, you’re still seeing a lot of boy protagonists in there,” Liesa Abrams, the editor in chief at Labyrinth Road, an imprint of Random House Children’s Books, pointed out.
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But even if the backlist contains a wealth of fiction starring boys, that’s not always a help to today’s young readers. Laura Gardner, a veteran middle-school librarian in Dartmouth, Massachusetts, told me that although some of the classics still stand up—kids love Gary Paulsen’s Hatchet and its sequels, along with the I Survived series—many students have a hard time getting into literature from past decades. Thanks to the disruptions of the pandemic, middle schoolers are coming into Gardner’s library with lower reading levels than they were when she started her career 17 years ago. But even the high-achieving students, she’s noticed, can’t be coaxed into picking up a book for fun unless it’s action-packed. “If the pacing isn’t pretty quick, then you’re going to lose the kid,” Gardner said. Older titles tend to feature more descriptive language and longer chapters; they start with more exposition, and have plots that unspool more slowly than today’s attention spans are used to.
How did the protagonist gender gap take hold? One possible explanation is that middle-grade authors are predominantly women, Kwame Alexander, an award-winning author and the founder of an eponymous new imprint for young readers at Sourcebooks, told me. “I think it’s incumbent upon writers like myself to nurture and develop and mentor more young men to consider this as a career,” he said. “How do we begin to let boys know that this is a viable thing—that your stories matter, that we want to read your stories?” Publishing is a risk-averse business, he added, and the assumption that girls are more avid readers, and thus a more reliable target audience, “fuels the industry.”
Right now, publishers might be especially motivated to play it safe. Sales have been in a years-long slump, after pandemic school closures and book bans cut off the typical mechanisms for putting new titles in front of kids. In the United States, decades of standardized tests have shown boys consistently lagging behind girls in reading skills; a 2018 study of 79 countries also found that more than 75 percent of boys reported spending less than 30 minutes a day—or no time at all—reading for fun. (Among girls, by contrast, 43 percent reported reading for at least half an hour a day.) “I think there’s a real hunger for things that will reach boys organically,” Chelsea Eberly, a longtime literary agent who represents many children’s-book authors, told me, later adding, “I would love to be the one who solves the boy-reader problem.” But in a time when breaking out an unknown voice has been especially challenging, publishing books geared toward a proven audience—that is, girls—seems, to many in the industry, like a more reliable bet than trying to build a new one.
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The number of lost readers—the middle graders who dropped the habit, or never adopted it in the first place—appears to be growing: From 1984 to 2025, according to federal surveys, the share of 13-year-olds who said that they never or hardly ever pick up a book for fun more than tripled. And when a student is skeptical of or intimidated by books, every hurdle, no matter how seemingly superficial, looms large. Ashleigh Rose, a librarian at Eliot-Hine Middle School, in Northeast Washington, D.C., told me that a protagonist’s gender comes into play most often when she’s working with male students who aren’t confident readers; those students largely resist being pitched a title centered on a girl. In the reverse situation, Rose said, “girls tend to not really mind as much.” Rose attributed that flexibility to her female students being accustomed to seeing literary representations of themselves. “As long as a kid has somehow felt like their lived experience has been found on a page, then they’ll try other stuff,” she said.
Some of the people I spoke with worried that the discourse on gender and books would be counterproductive. Amplifying stereotypes about boys and reading might further alienate them from the activity, Michael W. Smith, a professor emeritus at Temple University who has studied young men and literacy, told me. Smith also worried that discussions of academic-achievement gaps might turn the conversation into a zero-sum game, pitting boys and girls against each other. Others in the industry brush off the notion that publishers need to produce more books with boys in mind. The YA novelist John Green, for example, recently said that he loved the Baby-Sitters Club and Sweet Valley High series growing up “because they were human stories.” The most popular books do draw in broad, diverse audiences: Abrams, the editor, reported seeing plenty of boys at events for Dork Diaries or Keepers of the Lost Cities—both series with girl leads—even as, “for a lot of boys,” she said, “they do like to see boy protagonists.”
LaSalle intends to keep pitching all kinds of books to the boys who come through the shop. And until that gap is filled, she has plenty of strategies—including, in the case of one popular new fantasy series, Dragonborn, skirting around the main character’s pronouns for as long as possible. The cover, featuring a child and a dragon glaring from the cover, is helpfully gender-neutral, as is the character’s name. “Once boys start it,” she said, “they don’t care that it’s a girl protagonist.” Odd as it sounded, LaSalle’s approach made sense to me: Kids, of course, happily devour stories that bring them far from their own life. But before they can learn to love literature’s transportive qualities, or how it connects them to other perspectives, they have to see themselves as readers in the first place.