by Nancy Pearl
Norma Fox Mazer has made a career out of (and won numerous awards for) writing thought-provoking books about very real kids. In What I Believe, Vicki describes her feelings about the changes her family faces when her father loses his job, and she makes an impulsive choice with a potentially tragic outcome.
In Dovey Coe by Frances O’Roark Dowell, which takes place in the mountains of North Carolina in 1928, the eponymous twelve-year-old relates the events that follow an accusation that she murdered her sister’s suitor.
When her parents drop her off to stay with a woman she’s never met before, Bethany realizes that something is wrong—but it takes a lot of sleuthing before she learns the shocking truth about herself and an older sister she never knew she had, in Margaret Peterson Haddix’s Double Identity.
Primrose Squarp doesn’t believe her parents died at sea in a terrible storm, even though everyone else in her hometown of Coal Harbour, British Columbia, does. Although she grows to love her Uncle Jack, with whom she goes to live, she’d rather spend her time with Miss Bowzer, the owner and cook of a little restaurant called The Girl on the Swing, where all the food that’s ordered—from steak to waffles—is served on a waffle. Replete with recipes and a happy ending, Polly Horvath serves up a heartwarming tale in Everything on a Waffle. Pass the maple syrup, please.
Sue Stauffacher’s Harry Sue is the story of an eleven-year-old girl trying to cope with an abusively neglectful grandmother, parents in prison, and a best friend who’s a paraplegic. So you think you have problems?
Everything changes for Ida B when her mother is diagnosed with cancer: her family has to sell off part of their orchard (Ida B used to love visiting with various trees) and, worst of all, she’s no longer going to be taught at home but must attend public school. Katherine Hannigan’s Ida B . . . and Her Plans to Maximize Fun, Avoid Disaster, and (Possibly) Save the World shows what can happen when a little girl’s upside-down world makes her absolutely furious and she can’t imagine being happy again.
Did you ever wonder where Shahrazad got those 1001 stories with which she charmed her husband, the Sultan, into letting her live day after day, and night after night, when he’d killed off numerous wives before? Susan Fletcher’s Shadow Spinner introduces Marjan, a young crippled servant in the Sultan’s harem, who tells her own story of supplying Shahrazad with the stories to tell.
Ruth White’s Belle Prater’s Boy is the story of how two cousins—Gypsy, whose father committed suicide years before, and Woodrow, the cross-eyed son of Belle Prater, who up and left her family in Virginia without any explanation—become each other’s best friends.
IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF NANCY DREW AND THE HARDY BOYS
There is a wonderful time in every child’s reading life when he or she discovers the pleasure of the mystery story. Clues to discover, ideas to chase down, and a crime to solve; nothing is more rewarding than digging into a good mystery story and trying to figure it out before the detective does.While Nancy Drew and the Hardy Boys provide an almost endless list of titles to explore and Encyclopedia Brown is always ready to pose his mind-bending riddles, the mysteries in this category are filled with fun, fancy, and, just as in adult mysteries, settings all over the map, ranging from England to Switzerland to Manhattan to ancient Rome.
Anthony Horowitz’s novels about fourteen-year-old Alex Rider (a James Bond type in training who is frequently asked by England’s security agency MI-6 to take on a top-secret job) are page-turners filled with descriptions of neat gadgets to help Alex subdue enemies and escape from dangerous situations. The series opens with Stormbreaker and continues with Point Blank, Skeleton Key, Eagle Strike, and Scorpia.
My favorite mystery starring the intrepid girl sleuth Sammy Keyes is the first, Sammy Keyes and the Hotel Thief, which won an Edgar Award for best children’s mystery novel, but each of the volumes in this popular series by Wendelin Van Draanen’s has its own charm.
William Shakespeare, the whereabouts of a missing diamond worth more than a million dollars, a very cute eighth-grader named Danny Cordova, and the travails of being the new kid in the sixth grade occupy Hero Netherfield in Elise Broach’s Shakespeare’s Secret, which in addition to having a fast-moving plot also manages to work in a lot of Elizabethan history and raises the issue of whether or not Shakespeare was the author of the plays attributed to him.
Double Life and Shadow Beast are the first two books in the Invisible Detective series by Justin Richards, which features, along with Brandon Lake, the aforementioned invisible sleuth and a group of young criminologists bent on eradicating evil and wrongdoing wherever it’s found. But since no one can see him, does Brandon really exist?
From its title with a double meaning to the fast-moving, often very funny plot, Minerva Clark Gets a Clue by Karen Karbo offers entertainment for fifth- to eighth-graders. When a bolt of lightning during a rainstorm interferes with a computer art project by her older brother—in which she’s playing the central role—Minerva wakes up to find that all of her self-hatred (too tall, too clumsy, too ugly, too weird) and self-consciousness (what she really likes to do is make up rebuses and play with Jupiter, her pet ferret) have disappeared. And when a bookstore clerk is murdered and her beautiful cousin is taken to jail in handcuffs, Minerva sets out to discover whodunit.
You might want to start at the very beginning of the A to Z Mysteries by Ron Roy—Dink, Josh, and Ruth Rose’s adventures commence with The Absent Author.These are good for second-through fourth-graders, as are the Jigsaw Jones mysteries by James Preller (start with number one, The Case of Hermie the Missing Monster).
Other quality mysteries to try (and many are books in a series) include Mr. Chickee’s Funny Money, Christopher Paul Curtis’s clever story set in his hometown of Flint, Michigan; Chasing Vermeer by Blue Balliett; The Westing Game, The Tattooed Potato and Other Clues, and The Mysterious Disappearance of Leon (I Mean Noel) by Ellen Raskin; The Headless Cupid by Zilpha Keatley Snyder; the series by James Howe about Sebastian Barth, including Stage Fright, What Eric Knew, and Eat Your Poison, Dear; and Henry Winterfeld’s Detectives in Togas, a good mystery as well as an enjoyable way to learn Roman history.
THE KIDS NEXT DOOR
I know that many readers wish they lived next door to the kids featured in these books (I just wanted to live next door to a library), but unfortunately the only place we can meet them is in the pages of their stories.
Judy Blume’s Margaret Simon, in Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret
Betty Brock’s Annabel Tippins, in No Flying in the House
Beverly Cleary’s Henry Huggins, in Henry Huggins, Henry and Ribsy, Henry and the Paper Route, and others; Beezus and Ramona Quimby, in Beezus and Ramona; Ellen Tebbits, in Ellen Tebbits
Paula Danziger’s Matthew Martin, in Everyone Else’s Parents Said Yes and Sarah Kate (otherwise known as Skate) Tate, in United Tates of America
Lois Lowry’s Anastasia, in Anastasia Krupnik and sequels
Arthur Ransome’s Nancy and Peggy Blackett (who have a small sailboat called the Amazon) and John, Susan, Titty, and Roger Walker (their boat is called the Swallow), whose adventures are recounted in Swallows and Amazons, Swallowdale, We Didn’t Mean to Go to Sea, and others
KIDS TO THE RESCUE
I nstead of calling in the Ghostbusters, as the movie would have it, it’s sometimes better to call in the kids to save the world. These are good books to offer a reluctant reader, or the one who thinks books can’t be as exciting as a video game.
An excellent choice for kids ages eight to twelve is Terry Pratchett’s Only You Can Save Mankind, the first novel in a trilogy featuring Johnny Maxwell. Originally written more than a decade ago (during the first Gulf War, in fact, which is an integral part of the plot), Johnny, a computer-war-game-playing twelve-year-old, discovers that game space and real space/time are—shockingly—related, when the aliens in the computer game “Only You Can Save Mankind” send Johnny a note that they have chosen to surrender to his forces.This is a great introd
uction to many years of reading Terry Pratchett’s clever, good-humored, and inventive novels.
In The Merlin Conspiracy, fantasy writer extraordinaire Diana Wynne Jones introduces Roddy and Nick, who come from two different worlds, Earth and Blest (they’re similar, but with subtle differences), battle three evil people who try to turn the magic that runs through all the hundreds of worlds into the dangerous sort.
Whales on Stilts by M.T. Anderson is the story of Larry, a mad scientist (half whale, half man) who intends to take over the world with the help of his cetacean cohorts. The only three people who can possibly stop him are twelve-year-old Lily Gefelty (a perfectly ordinary kid whose father happens to work for Larry) and her two best friends, the decidedly unordinary Katie Mulligan—the heroine of her own series of horror novels for kids (all based on Katie’s own experiences)—and the equally extraordinary Boy Technonaut and retro super-geek, Jasper Dash. (Who could resist a book that begins, “On Career Day Lily visited her dad’s work with him and discovered he worked for a mad scientist who wanted to rule the earth through destruction and desolation.”?) The three reappear in another thrilling tale, The Clue of the Linoleum Lederhosen.
The paradoxes inherent in working with time are difficult to get your mind around: if you go back in time and accidentally kill your great-great-grandfather, would that mean that you’d never exist? Questions like this take on new meaning when someone starts playing not very funny tricks with time on seventh-grader Dorso Clayman, who, along with his best friend Frank, has to discover the brains behind the capers before the world ends up in serious trouble, in Gary Paulsen’s The Time Hackers.
Other excellent books that fall into this category include the Billy Clikk series by Mark Crilley, including Creatch Battler and Rogmasher Rampage; and Colin Bateman’s Running with the Reservoir Pups and Bring Me the Head of Oliver Plunkett, two adventures of Eddie and the Gang with No Name.
KING ARTHUR
The legend (and reality) of King Arthur has captured the imagination of readers of all ages looking for historical tales of heroism, magic, danger, treachery, and the sundering of the Round Table over the love of a woman. Of course, these elements appear in greater or lesser quantities, depending what age group the Arthurian novels are aimed at.The books recommended here concentrate on the heroism, magic, and danger aspects:
One of the first Arthurian novels for middle-grade readers is T. H. White’s The Sword in the Stone, a wonderful story about how Arthur—known here as Wart—innocently pulls the sword Excalibur from a stone in a churchyard and becomes the High King, after a thorough training by Merlin in the responsibilities of kingship. Although the books that follow—The Queen of Air and Darkness, The Ill-Made Knight, and The Candle in the Wind—grow increasingly dark and are definitely for older readers, the first one was clearly written with this age group in mind.
Howard Pyle wrote (and illustrated in a sort of Pre-Raphaelite style) several books about Arthur and his companions. The Story of King Arthur and His Knights, The Story of Sir Launcelot and His Companions, The Story of the Champions of the Round Table, and The Story of the Grail and the Passing of Arthur are old-fashioned retellings of the great tales of chivalry and knighthood, stories of the rescue of damsels in distress, and fighting the good fight in tournaments, all of which capture the pure romance of the time.
T. A. Barron’s Lost Years of Merlin series concentrates on the life and adventures of the great Arthurian wizard in the years before Merlin meets Arthur and comes, as it were, into the public consciousness. It all begins with a boy washed up on the coast of Wales with no memory of where he came from or who he is, in The Lost Years of Merlin. The adventures continue in The Seven Songs of Merlin, The Fires of Merlin, The Mirror of Merlin, and The Wings of Merlin.
In The Seeing Stone, At the Crossing-Places, and King of the Middle March, Kevin Crossley-Holland uses the legend of King Arthur as background for a story about a twelfth-century boy (also named Arthur) who has received a mysterious gift from his friend Merlin—a seeing stone that allows him to observe what’s happening in King Arthur’s time while his own life has some uncanny echoes of the past.
Jane Yolen wrote two winning novels about Arthur, including Sword of the Rightful King, in which Merlinnus (who is known as Merlin in most accounts) devises a plan to prove to the doubting citizens that Arthur is the true King of England, and The Dragon’s Boy, in which young Arthur learns wisdom and grace from a druid priest who’s conjured up a dragon.
Rosemary Sutcliff uses the legends as described by Sir Thomas Malory, the fifteenth-century writer to whom all subsequent Arthurian books are indebted, to tell the Arthurian saga in The Light Beyond the Forest: The Quest for the Holy Grail, The Sword and the Circle: King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table, and The Road to Camlann: The Death of King Arthur. (Sutcliff also wrote about Arthur for older readers; see “Historical Fiction” in Part III for more suggestions by this terrific British novelist.)
Younger readers in this age group can get a taste for the days of King Arthur and his Knights of the Round Table in Clyde Robert Bulla’s The Sword in the Tree, as young Shan fights for his family’s survival against the wickedness of his uncle Lionel, as well as in Jane Yolen’s trilogy Passager, Hobby, and Merlin.
Other portrayals well worth taking a look at include the classic Roger Lancelyn Green’s King Arthur and His Knights of the Round Table; Sir Gawain and the Loathly Lady by Selina Hastings (a solid introduction to one of King Arthur’s best knights); Parzival: The Quest of the Grail Knight, retold by Katherine Paterson; Nancy Springer’s I Am Mordred: A Tale from Camelot (a sympathetic look at the young man who grew up hating King Arthur, his father, and was fated to kill him—Oedipus, anyone?); and Mark Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court.
For use in school assignments, or just because kids often want to know what really happened, Kevin Crossley-Holland’s The World of King Arthur and His Court is chock-full of information and is, as well, a pleasure to read. He separates fact from fiction, offers brief biographies of all the important Arthurian players, and includes a useful map of Arthur’s Britain. The illustrations by Peter Malone resemble the illuminated manuscripts of the Middle Ages.
And just for fun, try Wizardology: The Book of the Secrets of Merlin by Dugald Steer, one in the luxe packaged series that also includes Egyptology: Search for the Tomb of Osiris, Being the Journal of Miss Emily Sands; Pirateology: The Pirate Hunter’s Companion; and Dragonology: The Complete Book of Dragons.
LET’S TALK ABOUT IT: GOOD BOOKS FOR DISCUSSION
If you’re involved in a parent/child book group, or you’re leading a discussion group for kids, try the titles described here. While everyone may not love them, they’re guaranteed to elicit strong reactions and lots of good conversation.
In a world where families are only allowed to have two children, Luke, the third child in his family, must always stay hidden so the government won’t learn of his existence. But when he meets a girl about his own age who also has two siblings and wants Luke to take part in a challenge to the Population Law, he must decide whether to risk the status quo for the unknown, in Margaret Peterson Haddix’s Among the Hidden, the first in The Shadow Children series, which also includes Among the Brave, Among the Enemy, and others.
Kids in the third grade and up will be interested in talking about Pink and Say by Patricia Polacco. Set during the Civil War, this is (be forewarned!) the tragic story of two teenage Union soldiers (one white, the other a former slave) who are sent to the infamous Andersonville Prison. But it’s also a story of how human connections can transcend death, as the adult Say tells his children (who tell their children and so on down through the generations) about how Pink once shook hands with Abraham Lincoln, and how Say touched the hand that touched the President’s hand....
In Madeleine L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time, Margaret Murry—with the help of her brilliant younger brother, Charles Wallace, and the assistance of three strange women (Mrs. Whatsit
, Mrs. Who, and Mrs. Which)—figures out how to rescue her father from the clutches of evil (in the form of a giant brain).
Three siblings, the children of the military ruler of Zimbabwe in 2194, set off on what they think will be just be a little adventure and find much more than they bargained for, in Nancy Farmer’s The Ear, the Eye and the Arm.
Other exceptional discussion books for middle-grade readers include Lloyd Alexander’s The Gawgon and the Boy; The Slave Dancer by Paula Fox; David Almond’s Kit’s Wilderness; Skeleton Man by Joseph Bruchac; Sahara Special by Esmé Raji Codell; Christopher Paul Curtis’s The Watsons Go to Birmingham—1963; Rifles for Watie by Harold Keith; Kyoko Mori’s Shizuko’s Daughter; Gregory Maguire’s Seven Spiders Spinning; The Great Gilly Hopkins by Katherine Paterson; and Robert C. O’Brien’s Z for Zachariah.
LOL: LAUGH OUT LOUD
Kids of all ages love funny books; in my experience the broader and more ridiculous the humor is, the more they enjoy the tale. Children in this age group can probably take a bit of subtlety, but too much may turn them off. Offer them books with odd but loveable characters, impossible situations, and strange settings, and you’ll see what I mean. Perhaps it’s needless to add that the books here all make for prime reading out loud, but they do. Think about picking one or two to share on your next car trip.
