The best middle-grade books featuring triangular friendships

The middle-grade classic Harriet the Spy was my favorite book as a kid. I read it so many times that my copy pretty much fell apart, and lots of tape had to be deployed to hold it together. Harriet is an aspiring writer with a great imagination, a daily neighborhood spy route, and a notebook in which she records her observations. She has two good friends: Janie, a cranky scientist; and Sport, a matter-of-fact athlete. The three seem to have nothing in common, but in spite of that, their triangular friendship is well balanced…until it falls apart, and Harriet has to put it back together by – gulp – apologizing. 

This book had me with the title alone. Who hasn’t spent a boring school break looking for something – anything – mysterious to investigate? Paul and his two best friends live in a small town in which nothing interesting happens…until hundreds of rubber duckies appear in a nearby yard one morning. Together, Paul (the hilariously observant narrator), Shanks (tiny but tough), and Peephole (whose many fears include the sound of other people’s sneezes) figure out how all those ducks ended up on Mr. Babbage’s lawn. The friendship here is comfortable and worn in, based on fond tolerance of one another’s quirks – as the best friendships usually are. 

Here we have a triangular friendship among three slight oddballs, which is one of my favorite kinds. It begins and is tested in the midst of a spate of local animal disappearances. Nestor, the narrator, is new in town (yet again) and doesn’t plan to put down roots. He also has a secret: he can talk to animals (and boy, do they ever talk back!). Almost in spite of himself, he befriends classmates Maria Carmen and Talib, and with help from some fauna with plenty of attitude, the three manage to save their town from a nasty witch—and cement their friendship along the way. 

Moving away from triangles involving friends of the same age and relative size, this is a fantasy in which an orphan girl named Stub must make a perilous journey in order to – spoiler alert – save the queendom. Her companions are an overly enthusiastic young chef’s apprentice and an elderly wizard who, much to his own annoyance, is small enough to fit in Stub’s pocket due to an errant spell. The dynamic doesn’t start out very promisingly, but in the end, the three make a great team. I love the theme of friendship forming among unlike persons thrown into peril together – and having one of them be many times older (and many times smaller) than the other two is an irresistible twist. 

This fantasy has a thoroughly realistic triangle that starts out as a friendship between two kids and eventually draws a third in – with much confusion and some resentment along the way. Cressi and Nate are on the lowest rung of a highly stratified society. When Cressi accidentally meets Beau, the heir to the throne, she befriends him despite their differences. But it will take a dangerous trip and a lot of arguments before Nate comes around. Many friendship triangles form when a new person joins an established duo, and there’s always plenty of opportunity for sparks to fly in this situation. Making the new person the future ruler of the other two ups the spark level considerably.