Super Hero Fiction for Middle Grade
What if you found out you could control gravity—during a school vision test?
What if your boring life suddenly launched you into a world of secret agents, superpowers, and flying possibilities?
What if the only person who could help you master your powers… was also the person you were told to avoid?
Welcome to The Sword and Story Podcast—where we help Christian families find exciting, faith-filled books for their boys.
Our mission is to raise strong, courageous warriors for the Kingdom of God. Join us on a quest to discover stories that inspire our boys to grow into godly young men.
I’m your host, Laurie Christine. I’m an author, bible teacher, wife, and mom to four wild, wonderful, boys. I’m the author of the Dragon Slayer Bible Series, adventure-packed biblical fiction and devotions for middle-grade boys.
Our guest author today is Meredith Davis.
Meredith Davis is a middle grade author of books with heart and heroes, books that celebrate minor miracles and the extraordinary in the ordinary. The Minor Miracle and The Minor Rescue are books one and two in The Amazing Adventures of Noah Minor series. She’s mother to a daughter and two sons, Nana to the cutest grandson you ever did see, and wrangles her crazy doodle in Austin, Texas.
The Minor Miracle
Super Hero Fiction for Middle Grade Readers
What happens when a seemingly average seventh grader discovers he has superpowers . . . and then realizes his life just got super complicated? Find out in this action-packed adventure perfect for young readers.
As a baby, Noah Minor miraculously—and mysteriously—survived a fall from a sixteen-story balcony. But ever since then, Noah’s life has been pretty boring.
As he enters seventh grade, Noah is hoping to be less ordinary and more extraordinary, like his best friends, trumpet prodigy Rodney and the practically perfect Haley. So Noah’s sure his star is on the rise when during a standard vision test, he learns he can manipulate gravity and is recruited to train with Gravitas, a top-secret government agency!
Noah thinks his life will now be awesome, but instead, he has a whole new set of problems. The biggest one: His great-uncle Saul is on Gravitas’s most-wanted list . . . but might also be the only person who can help Noah reach his full potential.
More Super Hero Fiction for Middle Grade Readers by Meredith Davis
TRANSCRIPT OF INTERVIEW
The Minor Miracle by Meredith Davis
Laurie Christine
What if you found out you could control gravity during a school vision test? What if your boring life suddenly launched you into a world of secret agents, superpowers, and flying possibilities? What if the only person who could help you master your powers was also the person you were told to avoid?
Welcome to the Sword and Story podcast, where we help Christian families find exciting, faith-filled books for their boys.
Boys and girls are different. God made them that way. Boys have a unique, God-given desire for adventures and battles. They want to fight enemies and slay dragons. Our mission is to raise strong, courageous warriors for the kingdom of God.
Join us on a quest to discover stories that inspire our boys to grow into godly young men. I’m your host, Laurie Christine. I’m an author, Bible teacher, wife, and mom to four wild, wonderful boys. I’m the author of the Dragon Slayer Bible series, adventure-packed biblical fiction and devotions for middle-grade boys.
Our guest author today is Meredith Davis. Meredith is a middle-grade author of books with heart and heroes—books that celebrate minor miracles and the extraordinary in the ordinary. The Minor Miracle and The Minor Rescue are books one and two in The Amazing Adventures of the Noah Minor series.
Meredith Davis, welcome to the Sword and Story podcast.
Meredith Davis
Thank you. That was such a great introduction. I love all of your what-ifs. Those are so fun and invite us into adventure. “What if” is two powerful words.
Laurie Christine
I’m excited to hear about your books and share them with our readers. I’ve been reading The Minor Miracle at night before bed, and I’ve really been enjoying it. It’s a lot of fun. Before we dive into talking about your books, I’d like to hear a little bit about you and your family. Tell us where you’re from and what your family looks like right now.
Meredith Davis
We live in Austin, Texas. We raised our kids in Austin, Texas. We’ve got three kids. My oldest is a daughter, and then two sons. My two older are married. My youngest son is in grad school. Three years ago, my daughter had a grandbaby, and we were so excited to welcome River—another boy—into our family. She’s pregnant with her second, which is due in September, and it’ll be a little girl. So the saga continues.
Laurie Christine
So exciting. Congratulations on grandbaby number two. That’s so fun. I’m curious about when your kids were a little younger. You had a girl and two boys. First of all, did your boys like to read? And if so, what kind of books did they enjoy when they were younger?
Meredith Davis
Yes, all of our kids are readers, which is such a joy and delight. I’m always sad when parents tell me their kids don’t love to read because it’s been a delight for us. You don’t get a guarantee that just because you like to read, your kids are going to like to read. My boys really did love adventure books. They loved books with lots of action that were fast-paced. When they were really little, they loved the Geronimo Stilton books.
Laurie Christine
Right, yep.
Meredith Davis
I don’t know if you recognize those. It was kind of like early graphic novels—yes, a rat detective. They liked the Warriors series. They loved adventures. They loved medieval adventures a lot. Whether it was an animal or a person, they really liked that. They continue to be really big readers, and I’m amazed at the big chunky books they still sink their teeth into. Even now they’re adults. My middle son is working, and he still loves to read. It’s a great escape for them. So we definitely bond over that.
Laurie Christine
I love that. One of my sons loves books. He devours books. The other three enjoy when I read to them—they will sit and listen while I read—but picking up a book is not usually their first thing to do. How would you encourage some of our listeners who may have kids who are reluctant readers? What are some ways to create a culture of loving books in your house?
Meredith Davis
That’s a great question. I’ll caveat and say that my middle son came a little later to reading than a lot of the other kids around him, especially because my daughter started reading really early. He was really into third grade before he decided he finally liked to read on his own. He loved listening.
Reading aloud is huge. Our family loved to read aloud. We did that every night, and it was a habit we had. They were welcome to fidget and have their little things they did, but they were all listening while we were reading the story. It was a story we were all listening to together, and we could talk about it—what do you think is going to happen next?
There was a series we really loved called Peter and the Starcatchers, written by Dave Barry and Ridley Pearson. It’s a precursor to Peter Pan, and it’s full of adventures and bad pirates and all this great stuff. It was super exciting—maybe just a tiny bit scary for the youngest one, but it was okay.
I don’t know what all your readers are going to feel about Harry Potter, but in third grade, during a strange year in 2007 and 2008, we took our kids out of school and traveled for a year. We were overseas, and in a lot of places there were very few books. We were trying to travel light, so we couldn’t carry a lot of books, and we were trying to find them on the road. Two things we found pretty commonly throughout the world were Agatha Christie mysteries and Harry Potter. My daughter was already a huge fan, but my son picked it up, started devouring the first book, and loved it. We slowly introduced them as the books got a little darker and they got older.
It was fun to see when the spark goes off, because for years I would try to get him to read and he was just flipping over the back of the couch. It was like a workout. We were trying to do fifteen minutes a day, and he would not focus. It was like pulling teeth. So that’s an encouragement to parents with kids who haven’t found the one thing yet.
To foster reading, pay attention: does your kid love sports? Maybe there’s a great sports biography. Maybe it’s nonfiction for him, even if your bent is fiction. Graphic novels are a big thing, and there’s a debate about them, but my thinking is if it gets them into reading the written word and it’s making a connection between them and a page, then it’s an entry point. Origami Yoda is a really fun middle-grade book that’s kind of a bridge—it has fewer illustrations per chapter, and then it draws them in. So find what turns them on, what they’re excited about, and help them get interested in a book that hits that target.
Also, start small and work your way up. I’m a huge fan of picture books for kids of all ages, and I still make my kids sit down and listen to a picture book. Another thing is having baskets of books in all different places in the house—being able to access one if you’re bored or need a story starter. Listening to books on tape is another thing.
Laurie Christine
I love all of those ideas. I’m a big fan of graphic novels. My kids have loved graphic novels, but they don’t usually stay there. They usually transition into books with more text and fewer pictures, and then eventually into text-heavy novels once they realize books are really fun and they love the story.
I would agree about Harry Potter as well. We are big Harry Potter fans. I’ve been working our way through each of the books with each of the kids, so they’re all at different stages. My oldest son is the avid reader, and I’ve always said I’m never going to stop reading with my kids—they’ll never be too old for me to read with them. He loves books so much that if I read the first couple of chapters, he can’t handle it and he’ll read the rest of the book that night. I guess that’s a good problem to have.
Meredith Davis
It’s a little bit of grief. It’s kind of like the precursor to him going off to college. He’s reading the book without you. It’s that independence.
Laurie Christine
Yes, yes. We had read all the Harry Potter books together—him and the next oldest brother—and we were halfway through book seven, the last book. I found out he had taken the book and stayed up all night on his own and finished it without us. I almost felt betrayed that he read it without me.
Meredith Davis
Oh man! Do you punish him? That’s hilarious. I love it.
Laurie Christine
I mean, I’m so glad that you love reading and that you just couldn’t handle not getting to the end of the book.
So let’s dive into The Amazing Adventures of Noah Minor. The first book is called The Minor Miracle. Meredith, I’m going to let you tell us about the book.
Meredith Davis
The Minor Miracle is about a boy named Noah Minor—so there you get the little play on words, “Minor Miracle.” In the beginning of the book, Noah is feeling pretty bad because he feels like he’s just ordinary. He’s got two really extraordinary best friends, Haley and Rodney, and he wishes he could do something extraordinary and stand out like they do at school. He’s searching for that.
Early on, he finds out he has a superpower: he can manipulate gravity. He finds out during an ordinary eye test. I play around a lot with ordinary and extraordinary. He’s got this power, but he spends most of the book certain that this is the thing that’s going to make him extraordinary. But then he has trouble accessing the gift. He has trouble discerning when to use it. He makes some big mistakes because of pride.
I won’t give spoilers, but one of the things I love to do with kids is talk about, “What is your superpower?” because what he discovers is that he actually had a superpower all along, and it was his friendships. We see it, but he didn’t recognize it as extraordinary. Friendships can be a superpower, and there are lots of things we have that may not feel like superpowers compared to something like manipulating gravity.
There are lots of adventures and a big tension about who he trusts. He’s got this Gravitas top-secret organization telling him he has the power, but also telling him he’s not really stellar. They imply they wouldn’t have chosen him for training if they didn’t also want to use him to get to a really bad guy. It hurts Noah’s feelings and his pride.
Then there’s a bad guy connection. His great-uncle Saul turns out to be Gravitas’s most wanted. He left the program and is on the run. He comes to Noah and says, “You are more powerful than you can imagine. Stick with me, and we’ll go places.” So it’s about how we know who to trust, wrapped into a fast-paced story with lots of mishaps and humor as Noah tries to find his way in both the superhero world and the ordinary world.
Laurie Christine
That’s so fun. As I was reading, I was hooked. I kept thinking, “Oh no—who is the bad guy? Is Gravitas an evil organization, or is Uncle Saul an evil villain?” That’s great.
Meredith Davis
A lot of readers were asking that even before it was published. They’d be reading and say, “Who am I supposed to trust?” And I’d say, “I don’t know. What do you think?” I love making the reader guess. At the end, I wrap it up with, “How could Noah really have known? What were the keys? What were the hints?” Because sometimes we don’t know. We don’t know who to trust. What’s truth? How do we figure it out?
Laurie Christine
That’s such a great underlying lesson and life lesson. I love those talking points. I also love the idea that Noah thought this would be the thing, and he thought it would look a certain way, but it didn’t look like what he imagined. I think that’s true for a lot of kids.
Expand on that theme a little bit—helping kids understand and identify: everybody has a superpower. What is your superpower? What is that thing God gave you—how God created you in a special way that you can use to bless others? How would you encourage readers to expand on that theme?
Meredith Davis
One of the things in Noah’s regular world is that he makes the A team—the basketball team at school. At first, he thinks maybe that will make him special, until he finds out he has superpowers.
There’s a parallel storyline: you might be given a gift, but if you don’t nurture it—and that requires practice, failing, learning from it, getting back up, and trying again—you’re not going to advance. You’re not going to use it to its fullness.
He learns that in basketball. The coach sees a spark in him, but Noah makes big mistakes on the court. He gets benched. In the superhero training program, he fails too. He thinks he’s all that until he gets around other kids who are also all that. All of them can manipulate gravity. There’s always another step, always someone better than you. So how do you harness your own strength? How do you work in that environment?
You have to stay the course. If you’re doing sports or music, you have to put the work in if you want results. It’s not automatic.
In these books, I focus on a different superhero. In the first one, I focus on Spider-Man and the phrase, “With great power there must also come great responsibility.” That’s a theme I work into the book, and I think it’s something we can all learn from. If you’re lifted up in the eyes of your peers—or your siblings, neighbors, whatever—then you’re expected to rise to the occasion.
Laurie Christine
It reminded me of when God led the Israelites into the promised land. He said He was giving them this land, but they didn’t get to just waltz right in. It was hard, and they had to fight giants. Just because God gives you a gift or you have a natural ability doesn’t mean it won’t be hard, and hard work doesn’t mean it isn’t what you’re supposed to be doing.
Noah might be tempted to give up because it’s hard and people are better than him, and think maybe this isn’t who he’s supposed to be. But embracing responsibility and effort—developing skills and honing skills—becoming the person God created you to be.
Meredith Davis
I love that you were playing my favorite game, which is: match this Bible study to your book. There are so many connections. I think about Joseph and his coat—his promises—and then he ends up in jail. Before he’s elevated, he’s not. You get this promise of something fantastic, but you have to go through hard stuff and persevere.
Laurie Christine
I can’t help it.
Meredith Davis
So yes, yes.
Laurie Christine
We touched on this a little already, but how would you say your book helps boys become strong, courageous warriors for the kingdom of God?
Meredith Davis
We did touch on it, but I want to add that there’s this element of strength—what makes us strong. In the end, his friendships and the way they support him are strength.
There’s a skill he keeps trying to get and he can’t. And in the climax, he’s called to strength and realizes his biggest strength is the willingness to lay down his life for his friend. There’s a hearkening to Aslan, and the whole idea of sacrifice—how hard it is, and how it can look like weakness but is actually strength, especially when you do it on behalf of someone else.
For boys and men, it’s like: you feel called to be strong. People in your life—your wife, your kids—will call you and ask you to be strong. But sometimes strength is vulnerability, willingness to connect, willingness to cry in sadness, being honest that something is sad. Those can be strengths—strength in weakness—especially when we do it for someone else.
Laurie Christine
I love that. A lot of times boys think strength and courage look like fighting and big battles, but sometimes strength is small. It might be making a sacrifice, showing humility, and God sees those as strengths. A courageous warrior in God’s kingdom sacrifices for friends, shows humility, unselfishness, and puts others before himself. It doesn’t always look like what kids imagine.
Meredith Davis
And if you’re a powerful kid, and power can look like popularity or physical strength, then stepping down—whatever that looks like—can take even greater strength. The farther you have to come to do that, the greater strength it requires.
In the beginning of the book, there’s a boy named Andy—everyone thinks he’s cool. Noah is getting bullied by a kid named Chuck. Andy breaks it up, and there’s strength—not in muscling his way in, but in how he handles it with attention and care. He removes Chuck from the situation in a way that doesn’t embarrass Chuck or Noah.
Andy can dunk and do all the things he’s admired for on the court. But is anyone admiring him for what he did in that hallway?
Laurie Christine
That’s so good. I tell my kids to use their power and strength for good. God has made them strong in different ways, and they can choose to use their strength to hurt people or to help people.
You’ve mentioned there are two books in the series. Tell us quickly about the second book, The Minor Rescue. How does it continue Noah’s story?
Meredith Davis
Yes. I recommend reading The Minor Miracle first, because you get to know Noah and his friends, but The Minor Rescue picks up where the first one left off. The action goes to New York City, and Noah is sent there to track down a kidnapper.
I did a lot of research on secret hidden places in New York City—there’s a subway platform under Grand Central Station that nobody knows about, and it’s real. There’s an extra floor on the Empire State Building that only certain people can access and go outside to see from. So there are fun secrets explored.
In this book, Noah starts off on top and super powerful. The theme is anger, because the way he’s powerful is by using anger, and anger is a powerful thing. But you start seeing the consequences—how it’s not healthy for Noah or the people around him. There’s destruction, and he has to find a better way to access his powers.
The inspiration for The Minor Miracle is Spider-Man, and the inspiration for The Minor Rescue is the Hulk: “The angrier I get, the stronger I get.” Noah feels that, but his journey is figuring out how else he can access his powers—manipulating gravity—in a way that doesn’t destroy him and others.
Laurie Christine
That’s so fun. I love that you chose Spider-Man and Hulk—the real ones—to tie into your story. Kids will connect with that. My kids enjoy Marvel movies, and it’s fun.
I also love how the book itself appeals to kids who enjoy superhero books and comics. The illustrations feel comic-book styled, and you even include those bold exclamations—bam, pal, zap—so it feels like a comic book, but it’s a full-length novel.
Meredith Davis
Thank you. And Noah Minor is a huge superhero fan. He loves comic books, so that’s part of it too.
Laurie Christine
Are you planning additional books in this series?
Meredith Davis
I have some ideas, but I’m working on other things right now. I’ve been thinking about “crop rotation”—working on different projects. People have asked what happens next, and I’m like, “I don’t know. We’ll have to wait and see.”
I’ve really loved working with my publisher at WaterBrook Press. They put out some great middle grades. If you like these, check out some other books they publish. They do the Wingfeather Saga and Beneath the Swirling Sky, a great series by Carolyn Leiloglou. She has one coming out soon, which is exciting.
You also have the dynamics of working with the publisher to have another book come out, so it’s not entirely in my hands. If it’s in the cards, God will make it happen.
Laurie Christine
I love those. I interviewed Carolyn a couple weeks ago and I’m looking forward to her next book coming out.
Tell our listeners where they can find out more about you and where they can get your books.
Meredith Davis
You can find me at meredithldavis.com—L for Lynn, my middle name. You’ll find links and information there. I love to do school visits. You can buy my books on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, anywhere you buy books.
I also have a Substack. If you’re interested in picture books, and especially if you teach Sunday school or you’re a teacher who likes themes, I pull together books by theme and do little reviews. It’s once a month on Substack, and it’s called Author with a KidLit Crush.
Laurie Christine
Very cool—thank you. I’ll have links in the show notes. Before we go, I’m going to read the book blurb—that’s author speak for the back cover copy—so you can get an idea of what the book is about. This is The Minor Miracle, the first book in The Amazing Adventures of Noah Minor.
What happens when a seemingly average seventh grader discovers he has superpowers—and then realizes his life just got super complicated? Find out in this action-packed adventure perfect for young readers. As a baby, Noah Minor miraculously and mysteriously survived a fall from a 16-story balcony. But ever since then, Noah’s life has been pretty boring. As he enters seventh grade, Noah is hoping to be less ordinary and more extraordinary, like his best friend, trumpet prodigy Rodney, and the practically perfect Haley.
So Noah’s sure his star is on the rise when, during a standard vision test, he learns he can manipulate gravity and is recruited to train with Gravitas, a top-secret government agency. Noah thinks his life will now be awesome, but instead he has a whole new set of problems. The biggest one: his great-uncle Saul is on Gravitas’s most wanted list, but might also be the only person who can help Noah reach his full potential.
Be sure to check out The Amazing Adventures of Noah Minor at MeredithLDavis.com. Meredith, thank you so much for coming on the show today. It was such a pleasure having you here.
Meredith Davis
Thank you, Laurie. It’s been really fun. I really appreciate it.
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