Where Did All the Parents Go?

Poor Jacob and Elizabeth Everton—our hero Jake’s parents. Gone too soon! 💔 They were tragically killed when Jake was just a baby… But don’t blame us! We had to do it! 

Have you ever noticed just how many orphans are running around in middle-grade fiction? 🏃‍♂️💨 Of course, Harry Potter is a famous one, living in the cupboard under the stairs. Then you’ve got the Baudelaire orphans (A Series of Unfortunate Events), Anne Shirley (Anne of Green Gables), the Pevensie kids (The Chronicles of Narnia), and even James from James and the Giant Peach—his parents got trampled by an escaped rhinoceros! (Yikes! 🦏😳)

From a storytelling perspective, it all comes down to one thing: kid power! 🚀 In middle-grade fiction, the young heroes need to be the ones making the big decisions, taking risks, and calling the shots—without any parental safety nets. If loving, capable parents were in the picture, they’d do what good parents do: protect their kids from danger, making sure they’re safe, warm, well-fed, and definitely not sneaking off to battle evil sorcerers or uncover magical conspiracies. (Boring! 😴)

And let’s be real—if Jake’s parents were still around, they never would’ve let him pickpocket in Victorian London, talk to ghosts, or oh, I don’t know… challenge an entire secret society of warlocks. 😅

Another reason we’re grateful for setting The Gryphon Chronicles in Victorian times? No cell phones. No GPS tracking. No instant SOS calls to Mom and Dad. 🎩🚖

Modern-day authors have to do all sorts of storytelling gymnastics 🤸‍♂️ to separate kids from their tech. Otherwise, a thrilling adventure could be stopped in its tracks with a single phone call:

📞 “Hey, Mom, there’s a monster in my closet! Come get me!”
“Okay, sweetie, I’m on my way.”
The End. 😂

Even R.L. Stine (Goosebumps) has said, “Cell phones ruin plots!” Writers today are constantly looking for ways to remove them: dead batteries, no signal, mysterious tech-frying magic—whatever it takes!

While orphaned or missing parents are a storytelling necessity, we’re also very aware that real kids in the world have lost parents, live with guardians, or are in difficult situations. That’s why we always do our research to make sure Jake’s experiences feel real and respectful—so that kids in similar situations might see a little bit of themselves in his journey. We want Jake to feel like an ally to those readers, not to make them feel worse.

Can you think of other books where the parents were mysteriously missing? How were they removed from the picture? 🚪💨 Let us know in the comments! 👇😊