I Love MG: Charlotte's Garbage

There is this garbage heap buried deep in the middle of E.B. White’s Charlotte’s Web, and I can’t believe I forgot it was there. I recently revisited White’s Middle Grade barnyard masterpiece because I love the talking critters, the ambitious spider and the weighing of mortality. But there’s also this great garbage!

“Here, in a small clearing hidden by young alders and wild cranberry bushes, was an astonishing pile of old bottles and empty tin cans and dirty rags and bits of metal and broken bottles and broken hinges and broken springs and dead batteries and last month’s magazines and old discarded dishmops and tattered overalls and rusty spikes and leaky pails and forgotten stoppers and useless junk of all kinds, including a wrong-size crank for a broken ice-cream freezer.”

White lingers so long on that garbage pile because it plays a big role in the story – the rat Templeton makes an important discovery in all the junk – and it’s a reminder to me that place-setting can be glorious and essential even in small books with big print. Are there any settings in Middle Grade that still make you swoon?