What would you do if you were destined to kill your one true love? For as long as Blue Sargent can remember, she’s been told that if she kisses her true love, he will die. And in her family – one filled with bona-fide psychics – predictions should never be... Read More
Dwarves and dwarf phlegm. Trolls and troll patties. Killer crickets. Coded fireflies. Centaurs. Fairies. An evil pixie. A few humans. Magic. Black magic. And gadgetry produced with profound intelligence and creativity. Mix these elements together in a war that threatens the whole human race. Every minute is critical. Artemis Fowl,... Read More
Years ago, a rebellious prince named Jaron was sent away in exile from the castle; only his ship was attacked by pirates, and all aboard were presumed dead. Now the country of Carthya is on the brink of civil war. The royal family has been murdered and political tensions run... Read More
What would it be like to create your perfect mate? What if you were a fifteen year old, who had that opportunity and the smarts to do it? Really, who is not fascinated by the technology that could create new life and the chance to do it? This is the... Read More
Seraphina is a first novel (by a comic book creator) and it is astonishingly good; intelligent, original, heartbreaking, and I say this even though I am not a big fan of dragon fantasies, which this is (at least in part). It must also be said, upfront, that it’s a challenging... Read More
Jennifer Strange is far too young to be in charge of running anything, but at Kazam Mystical Arts Management, she’s all they’ve got. The real boss, the Great Zambini, disappeared in a puff of smoke at a child’s birthday party and hasn’t been seen or heard from in six months. ... Read More
Mike picks up a hitchhiker and is lured to a graveyard for those who died too young. As the specters rise, he hears hair-raising stories about their untimely deaths. The question is: will he live to tell the tales?Set outside of Chicago, Mike is driving home one night long past... Read More
Justice, redemption and salvation all come into play in this gripping mix of gothic horror and historical fantasy. In a Dickensian London made eerie by evil and magic, two orphans, Lizzie Rose and Parsefall, live with the puppeteer Grisini. Their lives are grim enough when they make a sinister discovery:... Read More
A girl haunted by her mother’s abandonment and saddled with a ghost must navigate her first days of high school. In this moody, atmospheric graphic novel, she gets unexpected help putting her anxieties to rest. Maggie won’t admit that she is nervous about attending high school for the first time... Read More
The Obsidian Blade is heart-stopping both literally and in terms of the frenetic pace of the action.The actual blade is used by a robed priest to stab the protagonist through his heart. And that horrifying scene is just one tiny piece of the breakneck action that swirls through shifting alliances... Read More
The man Jack sets out to kill the whole family, especially the baby, barely a toddler, but the child wanders away in the night, ending up in the nearby graveyard. Mistress Owens and her husband, ghosts, both of them, dead 250 years now, discover the newly orphaned boy and they... Read More
Twelve-year-old orphan Lyra Belacqua lives at Oxford University's Jordan College, where she has managed to avoid being educated by the scholars who look after her and runs wild. In this parallel world to ours, everyone has a daemon attached to them always-a sort of alter ego in animal form. Lyra's... Read More
There's a ripple in the walls of the world. When nine-year-old Tiffany Aching is warned away from a sharp-toothed green-headed monster by two tiny red-headed blue-skinned men in a boat, it seems that she may be the new witch of the lowlands, for the Nac Mac Feegle, the most feared... Read More
Ethan Feld hates baseball. The whole league calls him "Dog Boy," because he's always wanting a walk-he's the worst player in the history of baseball. The day the Roosters face the Angels, the only people holding Ethan back from quitting for good are his father and the team's star, Jennifer... Read More
Tired of living in suburbia or wherever you are? Why not try an alternate reality with the bizarre stories, poems, and musings, accompanied by even more surreal drawings, doodlings, and full-color paintings from the strange brain of Shaun Tan. (Tan is the innovative Australian artist who brought us to another... Read More
Climb on board the Leviathan, a living airship, and join the action with two teenage heroes as they’re swept up in an alternate universe version of World War I. In this roughly historical take on the Great War, Scott Westerfeld delivers thrilling adventure as he creates an intriguing world of... Read More
Katniss Everdeen, sixteen, lives with her mother and twelve-year-old sister Prim. The story is set in the future, in a land called Parem, a nation of twelve districts that rose from the ashes of an ancient area called North America long ago. It used to house thirteen districts,... Read More
What's the real scoop on Cinderella? In her very first children's book, author Gail Carson Levine blows us away with an innovative, insightful, and riveting novel told by Ella, no shrinking violet or uncomplaining doormat to her new step-family. Cursed at birth by the interfering fairy Lucinda's gift of obedience,... Read More
Rick Riordan’s plunge into ancient Egyptian mythology, twenty-first century-style, begins with a warning: “The following is a transcript of a digital recording. . . It seems impossible that the two young narrators are telling the truth, but you, the reader, must decide for yourself.” Fourteen-year-old Carter Kane and his twelve-year-old... Read More
Harry Potter fans, rejoice. Here's the first of The Bartimaeus Trilogy, a crackling and original English fantasy that takes place in an alternate London. The viewpoint alternates between the overblown, self-possessed, wisecracking and sometimes put-upon narrative of a 5,000-year-old djinni, Bartimaeus, and an omniscient narrator who follows Nathaniel, a twelve-year-old... Read More
Ketchvar III, a snail-like creature on a mission from the planet Sandoval IV, begins his narrative thus: "We are skimming over the New Jersey countryside in full search mode, hunting a fourteen-year-old." Down below, a target has been selected: Tom Filber. Much to Tom's horror, Ketchvar crawls out of his... Read More
Fans of Rick Riordan’s Percy Jackson and the Olympians series (and there are plenty of them!) won’t have to mope around because that series has ended. Their favorite author returns to Camp Half-Blood in the first book of The Heroes of Olympus series. Three teens – Jason, his girlfriend Piper,... Read More
A devastating car accident left three teens at the brink of death; one, the daughter of a biomedical pioneer named Matthew Fox, was saved; the other two languished for 260 years before technology caught up with their medical injuries. All that time, Locke and Kara, were not actually lying in... Read More
Misfit teen Anya attends a private high school where the only people who really talk with her are tough-girl frenemy Siobhan and fellow Russian immigrant Dima, whom Anya deems too “fobbie” (fresh off the boat) to be her friend. She wants to be more American, especially more slender like most... Read More
In Cassia’s world everything is perfect. She wants for nothing. The Society provides her with the exact amount of food she needs for proper nutrition for her optimal weight, height, and age. She will live until her 80th birthday (80 being the optimal age for having a full life without... Read More
Asa, Solvieg, and Harold are spending their winter tucked away in a hidden fjord, while their father, the king, leads the war back home. While they are reluctant to leave him to live in this desolate icy land, they are grateful to be safe and protected. However, when many of... Read More
With the action always pumping and the suspense continuously building, readers will cheer, as Percy Jackson returns to step into the world of Roman myths in The Son of Neptune, the second book in The Heroes of Olympus Series. Seven half-bloods shall answer the call, To storm or... Read More
Lonely twelve-year-old September is well-versed in fairytales and ready for an adventure, so nothing seems more fitting than when a green man riding a flying leopard comes to whisk her away from a sink full of dirty dishes to Fairyland. September is not a cold-hearted child, but like popular heroines... Read More
Throughout Jacob’s childhood, Grandpa Portman regaled Jacob with stories about how his parents in Poland had shipped him off to a children’s home in Wales because monsters were after him. The monsters “stank like putrefying trash; they were invisible except for their shadows; a pack of squirming tentacles lurked inside... Read More
Seraphim and chimera, love and war, humans and beasts come together in this brilliantly-written fantasy intricately woven by Laini Taylor. Karou is a young art student living in Prague, but readers will quickly recognize – from her bright blue hair and fantastic artistic ability – that she is not of... Read More
"There once was a boy named Milo who didn't know what to do with himself - not just sometimes, but always." So begins my number one favorite children's fiction book of all time. I first read it when I was in seventh grade and have revisited it scores of times... Read More
Alex is celebrating his first weekend home alone. At 16, he’s glad to be free of parental hassles and his bratty younger sister. All is well until the unimaginable shatters his world and destroys life as Alex knows it. A volcano in Wyoming erupts, and the force of the eruption... Read More
Love, secrets, betrayals, murder, greed, and madness all play roles in this eerie tale, set in Victorian London and sure to grip readers from the very start with its startling cover featuring a hand reaching from the depths of a crypt. Greave Hall has become a dark, haunted place since... Read More
When you first pick up this very brown and battered-looking wordless picture book graphic novel with the sepia-toned photograph on the cover, of a man in a suit and 1950s-style fedora, carrying an old suitcase, it looks like an old photo album you found up in your grandparents' attic. Then... Read More
Since Anand's father left his family in India to go work in Dubai, he's stopped sending home checks, leaving 12-year- old Anand, his ill younger sister, Meera, and their mother destitute. Anand now works in the Bowbajar Market as a dishwasher at a tea stall, scrubbing the pots and glasses... Read More
The story behind the story is one that really grabs kids: a fifteen-year-old boy from Montana, born in 1983 and home-schooled all his life, loves to read books about magic and dragons, spurred by reading Jeremy Thatcher, Dragon Hatcher by Bruce Coville. He starts to write his own... Read More
Larklight is a rambling, ramshackle house that spins on its own remote orbit out in the deeps beyond the moon. It was constructed in the early 1700s, which, if you recall your history, was just a few years after Sir Isaac Newton's discoveries made it possible for people to travel... Read More
Fifth and sixth graders who think they like scary books are going to clamor for this one, the first in a series of five, once they see the dark and foreboding moonlit cover, but let me warn you—it's really scary. Readers will not sleep at night if they’re foolhardy enough... Read More
"When my brother Fish turned thirteen, we moved to the deepest part of inland, because of the hurricane and, of course, the fact that he'd caused it." With that first sentence washing you over like a storm, meet Mibs Beaumont, from a most unordinary family, each member having an exceptional... Read More
Writing an essay about how the Smekday holiday (formerly called Christmas) has changed in the year since the aliens left, eighth grader Gratuity Tucci, known as Tip, offers her story of her singular experiences since the Boov invasion in 2013. Though the aliens have just announced that all Americans must... Read More
When Breaking Dawn, the fourth and final book in Stephenie Meyer's vampire saga, came out in the summer of 2008, teens went wild, going to midnight costume parties at bookstores in a frenzy second only to the Harry Potter scenes of the past decade. Only one week after... Read More
From its first sentence—"There is nothing lonelier than a cat who has been loved, at least for a while, and then abandoned on the side of the road."—you are pulled into the aura of this extraordinary book, a melding of two seemingly unrelated stories. First, there is the abandoned calico... Read More