J.P. Tate Books in Order

The J.P. Tate books, sometimes grouped under the “Just the Tates!” label, follow brother and sister James Priestly (J.P.) and Caroline Tate as they navigate divorced parents, new places, and their own runaway imaginations. The stories sit in the same realistic, gently comic space as the Anastasia novels but with their own flavor.

In The 100th Thing About Caroline, eleven-year-old Caroline is obsessed with dinosaurs and certain she understands how mysteries work. When she and J.P. find an alarming letter addressed to their mother’s new boyfriend, they decide he must be planning to “eliminate” the children. The result is a full-scale amateur investigation in their New York apartment building that says as much about wishful thinking and sibling teamwork as it does about clues.

Switcharound sends the Tates to stay with their father and his new family in Des Moines after years of living apart. Caroline is drafted into babysitting infant twin sisters when she would rather be studying paleontology, while electronics-obsessed J.P. is roped into coaching a beginner baseball team. Their plan to make the summer miserable gradually turns into a truce as they figure out how to fit into a blended household.

In Your Move, J.P.!, the focus shifts more squarely to J.P. himself. Now twelve, he falls hard for a new girl with a British accent and begins to reinvent himself to impress her, including telling a wild lie about having a rare disease. The book traces how a single bad decision can snowball and what it feels like to untangle a web you created yourself.

Across the three books, Lowry keeps the situations just heightened enough to be funny while grounding them in feelings many readers will recognize - jealousy, embarrassment, curiosity about adults’ lives, and the awkwardness of first crushes. The Tates argue, misread situations, and sometimes behave badly, but their underlying loyalty to one another always shows.

These stories are especially appealing to readers who like family comedies with a light mystery or relationship twist. They also offer a nice bridge for kids moving from shorter chapter books into richer, character-driven middle-grade fiction.