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Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/43746
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/43746
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

Certainly it's okay to have people (or animals) die in middle-grade fiction. I mean, _Bambi_ (the movie) is rated G and young Bambi sees his mother murdered before his eyes. Ditto with dad in _The Lion King_. Actually, one or more parents dying (near the beginning, as a catalyst for the MC, or before the story begins) is a very common trope in children's literature, especially middle-grade, from _A Little Princess_ to every Disney movie ever made (okay, maybe not _every_ one).

It is, however, less common for children to die. When you do, it's usually not very detailed. Look at the _Little House_ series. Laura Ingles Wilder lost both a baby brother and her own infant son in real life. The first loss she left out of the books entirely and the second one is there but it's so fleeting you blink and you miss it.

Certainly you can kill off a child if it's vital to the story. _Little Women_ is an example. But generally children aren't the targets. Look at _Charlie and the Chocolate Factory_. Every child but Charlie gets mangled in some delicious way and is presumed dead, but somehow ends up okay (though sometimes altered).

Your suggestion on my question went a few steps further:

> You've said it yourself: 18 = life. It follows that had there only been 17 travellers, they would not have come home alive.

Imagine the stress: "You can only find 17? Well, you're all dead then." It's the sort of pressure I can see in Young Adult, but not really in Middle Grade, unless it's from an over-the-top villain (the Wicked Witch of the West in _The Wizard of Oz_ comes to mind, and even then the only child in danger is Dorothy).

When you're talking about real death of a dozen and a half children, starting at age 2, for a 12 year old's pretty simple failure to complete a task, a task she didn't even know had such dire consequences, well that's not really a Middle Grade topic anymore. There are ways to make it work, if you must, but since the comment was about my story, I can tell you for sure it would be too much for it. And probably for most Middle Grade.

Original score: 8