“Rule #1: Don’t Stick a Spatula Down Your Best Friend’s Throat.” That’s the first of Allie Finkle’s many engaging chapter headings and rules, along with her explanations of each one, which she’s been recording in a notebook. There’s “Never eat anything red.” Which is partly to blame for her little… Read More

Lindy, Thomas, and Benjamin, three ordinary siblings, ages 7 to 13, are at the zoo when they first encounter Professor Savant. You’ll excuse me for butting in," he says to them. "But if you’re looking for something really unusual, have you ever considered a Whangdoodle?" According to the professor, the… Read More

“I wish that I didn’t sometimes, but I remember everything about that cursed, unspeakably unhappy night twelve years ago, when I was just three years old and both my parents were murdered.” That’s just the start of Daniel’s extraordinary narrative that grabs you by the scruff of the neck and… Read More

This past decade, we have been blessed with the Harry Potter effect, and that fantastical boy wizard is still casting his dazzling spell across the Earth. What is it about Harry Potter that has worked its way into the lives and psyches of readers worldwide? There have been many good… Read More

On Sam’s birthday, the one he thinks will be the worst ever, his Aunty Dot brings to the house a small white dog she has just hit with her car. The dog, which Sam names Jenny, has no obvious injuries, though in her mouth, she is holding a sprig of… Read More

In the City of Ember in year 241, the sky is always dark. There is no moon, or even sun in Ember. The electric lights come on every morning at six, and go out every night at nine. The city is old, and everything, including the power lines, needs repair…. Read More

      “Look, I didn’t want to be a half-blood.      If you’re reading this because you think you might be one, my advice is: close this book right now. Believe whatever lie your mom or dad told you about your birth, and try to lead a normal life.      Being a half-blood… Read More

"Where’s Papa going with that ax?" eight-year-old Fern Arable asks her mother at breakfast, and from that first line, we’re pulled right into a masterfully told story filled with compassion, humor, and heart. Yes, Fern saves the runt of the litter, but it’s not just a story about a girl… Read More

Fut a whunny bew nook! There are tworty-foo feally runny pyming rhoems about Runny Babbit and pots of his lals in this bazy crook. Didn’t understand those last sentences? They are filled with Spoonerisms, where consonants are switched for pairs of words. Or, as the introductory poem says, "If you… Read More

“It is such the disappointment," says the mouse mother, Antoinette, upon learning that all of her newborn litter of babies has died, save one. Despereaux, his mother names him, for all the sadness and despairs in the castle where the mice live. Despereaux Tilling is a ridiculously small mouse with… Read More

Sahara Jones has a True Ambition: she is going to be a writer. In the meantime, she’s repeating fifth grade, having kept her abilities a secret from all her teachers since her father moved out two years ago. Her new teacher calls herself Madame Poitier. The kids call her Miss… Read More

Peter Hatcher has an almost-three-year-old brother named Fudge, who not only receives all their parents’ attention, but gets away with everything. The only time Peter likes him is when Fudge is sleeping, sucking his thumb and making a slurping sound. Peter walks home to his family’s apartment on… Read More

You remember Frindle, of course, and fifth grader Nick Allen who invents a new word for the word "pen"? Natalie Nelson, a sixth grader who wants to get published in School Story? Greg Kenton writing and selling his own comics at school in Lunch… Read More

Billy’s friends Tom and Alan bet Billy fifty dollars that he can’t eat fifteen worms.  Billy’s going to need all the discipline and will-power he can muster if he has any chance to succeed.  It’s not an easy bet for Billy: at one point he has a terrifying nightmare that… Read More

Ida B Applewood has a pretty perfect life, with her loving parents and her floppy-eared dog, Rufus. She’s been home-schooled by her parents ever since the disastrous two weeks and three days she lasted in kindergarten class at the local public school. She’s never missed having school friendships, as she… Read More

Jeffrey Magee, orphaned at three years old, runs away from his aunt and uncle’s house once he hits eleven. And literally runs—he runs for days and finally slows down when he gets to the town of Two Mills, Pennsylvania. He wows the residents of Two Mills with his extreme athletic… Read More

There are strange things afoot on the thirtieth story of Wayside School. The classroom’s first teacher, the wicked Mrs. Gorf, turned all her children into apples, but had to be replaced when they reversed her spell, turned her into an apple, and she accidentally was eaten by Louis, the schoolyard… Read More

Ten-year-old Bud Caldwell awakens, that first night in his new foster home, feeling like something is stuck in his nose. Opening his eyes, he sees Todd Amos, the bullying son of his latest set of foster parents, holding a #2 Ticonderoga pencil and exclaiming, "I’ve never gotten it in as… Read More

The surprise hit of the year, this easy-to-read first person expose of middle school life told by sixth grader Greg Heffley through cartoons and hand-written journal entries has sold more than a million copies. It’s throw-yourself-on-the-floor-and-roll-around-howling hilarious, and boys, especially, are inhaling this book. All those 97-pound weaklings out there… Read More

When seventh grader Emma-Jean Lazarus encounters the popular Colleen Pomerantz crying in the girl’s bathroom, she ignores her usual instincts to stay out of the messy lives of her classmates, and promises to help. Emma-Jean’s adored father, a brilliant and eccentric mathematician, died in a car accident two years ago,… Read More

Sometimes you pick up a book and it just says, “Read me.” This one has an irresistible cover, a compelling title, and a most unexpected first line that will hook readers and keep them riveted: “The day I decided to steal a dog was the same day my best friend,… Read More

Evan Treski has been feeling angry and humiliated ever since he found out that his little sister Jessie will be skipping third grade. “You ruin everything . . . I hate you,” he tells her, even though he really doesn’t. Evan has always been her friend and protector, and Jessie… Read More

Meet fifth grader Dave Parker, a known loudmouth who is in the middle of his fourth hour of not talking. In spite of being called on to give his oral social studies report on India, he is determined to stick with his experiment of staying silent for an entire day…. Read More

Beginning with one of many well-chosen quotes-"I know that the education of this child will be the distinguishing event of my life, if I have the brains and perseverance to accomplish it."-this is a somber and absorbing biography of Annie Sullivan, who any schoolgirl can tell you was Helen Keller’s… Read More

Longest snowmobile journey? Largest monkey? Most valuable guitar? Longest fingernails? (The record holder, Lee Redmond, has fingernails 28 feet, 4.5 inches long, and they’re still growing strong.) Who publishes the best collection of superlatives year after year? Only one name is on the tip of everyone’s tongue, no matter how… Read More

"There are good things about being president and there are bad things about being president." Thus starts the 2001 Caldecott Medal winner, a riotously funny, trivia and anecdote-loaded picture book tribute to the number one job I the U.S., illustrated with grandly humorous but affectionate watercolor caricatures of our presidents… Read More

"Art is a thing that everybody does different. Nobody’s drawing is better than someone else." That’s what the author/illustrator states in her remarkable and instructive first book, though you may soon conclude that her drawings are way better than your own. Mind you, the author was only 8 when this… Read More

Here’s a book that will break your heart. In 2000, when Fumiko Ishioka, Director of the Tokyo Holocaust Center, acquired the suitcase of a Jewish child who was at Auschwitz during World War II, she set out to discover what happened to that child. First, there’s the photograph of the… Read More

While the cover looks like a large picture book fantasy story about dinosaurs, you’ll quickly realize that this is the astonishing true account of Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins, who in 1853 put together the first ever life-sized cement-cast models of dinosaurs, including an iguanadon and a forty-foot long megalosaurus. Until Hawkins… Read More

In 1841, seven-year-old Wes Powell was taunted, beaten, and stoned by classmates angry at his father, Reverend Powell’s, abolitionist sermons. Wes left school and was tutored by a neighbor, a self-taught naturalist who believed in learning through observation and firsthand experience. Unnerved by a wave of anti-abolitionist violence, the Powells… Read More

Arguably the finest of the many books published for children in honor of the 100th anniversary of the Wright Brothers’ first flight on December 17, 1903, this scrapbook has it all: good looks; a meaty, quote-filled text that reads like a dream; scientific explanations children will inhale and understand; huge… Read More

The first page of this eloquent picture book will stun readers and listeners of all ages. Look at the handsome full-page painting of a somber young African American boy, barefoot, sitting on an upturned wooden barrel, his back against a brick wall. The text on the facing page states, simply,… Read More

What was the game of baseball like when it began, more than a century ago? First off, back then, you could get a runner out by soaking him. What’s that? First, examine the old-timey yellow and red watercolor and pencil-crayon cartoon illustration on the second page, and you’ll see a… Read More

Kids might not read this whole big compendium cover to cover, but as a book to dip into for truly funny and classic jokes, riddles, practical jokes, spotlights on major comedians, and advice on becoming a comedian, it’s an endless source of material. There are more than 1,700 jokes here,… Read More

Look at this book’s comic book cover with tanks blazing and airplanes dropping bombs and explosions everywhere. See that helmeted soldier coming up from the hatch, his fist pumping the air triumphantly? Hold on a minute—that soldier looks like a kid. Hey, it is a kid—it’s Jon Scieszka when he… Read More

Get to know the man behind the legend and the famous ride in a clearly written and handsomely laid out biography amply illustrated with stately brown-toned portraits, paintings, reproductions, maps, and photographs. As an apprentice to his French-born father, a master silversmith, Paul learned the family trade but also served… Read More

“Marveling at Marsupials,” is the first of many lively chapter headings, and that’s just what you will do when you pore over the amiable narrative, fascinating descriptions, astonishing facts, and the plethora of color photos of that third group of mammals, the metatherians. What’s the largest living marsupial? It’s the… Read More

It’s been more than two centuries since Meriwether Lewis and William Clark undertook their famed expedition with the Corps of Discovery to chart the lands west of the Mississippi in 1803. They spent two and a half years, journeying 7,000 miles to the Pacific Ocean and back. Along with their… Read More

"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." Isn’t that just the best first line? This is one of those high-powered Kids Save the World types of book, a postmodern… Read More

In Christopher Bing’s brilliant, Caldecott Honor-winning interpretation of Thayer’s classic 1888 narrative poem, we are astonished, amazed, and awestruck at his multilayered, wondrous scrapbook, set up like an old 1888 newspaper. Baseball lovers of all ages will spend hours poring over the tickets, newspaper clippings, old baseball cards, a stereoscope… Read More

I’ve been a Pinkwater fan forever. Or at least since the 1970s when he started publishing bizarrely comical children’s fiction books like Lizard Music and Fat Men from Space and one near and dear to New Jersey’s little heart, The Hoboken Chicken Emergency. Who… Read More

On the American Library Association’s list of the 100 most-challenged books of the 1990′s, Alvin Schwartz’s Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark is number one with a bullet. The first volume in Schwartz’s three-part Scary Stories series is, in film terms, the Citizen Kane of books that… Read More

Shari, Michael, Bird and Greg have nothing to do in the boring, remote town of Pitts Landing, and decide to explore the creepy ramshackle Coffman house down their street. After pillaging the basement, they find old treasures: boas, old coats, and even a working automatic camera. Greg takes a photo… Read More

Nicknamed "Qwerty" after the six letters on the top left side of a keyboard, 13-year-old Robert Edward Stevens, a computer-loving boy, digs up a mysterious box labeled "Thomas A. Edison" in his West Orange, New Jersey back yard. Inside is an unusual machine which appears to have been buried for… Read More

“Claudia knew that she could never pull off the old-fashioned kind of running away . . . Therefore, she decided that her leaving home would not be just running from somewhere but would be running to somewhere. To a large place, a comfortable place, an indoor place, and preferably a… Read More

Sixteen confused people with little in common arrive at Sunset Towers, a sleek apartment building overlooking Lake Michigan in fictional Westingtown, WI. They are here because the will of paper magnate Sam Westing is about to be read. The group is diverse in the extreme: their professions include doctor, judge,… Read More

"In fairy tales witches always wear silly black hats and black cloaks and they ride on broomsticks. But this is not a fairy tale. This is about REAL WITCHES. REAL WITCHES dress in ordinary clothes and look very much like ordinary women. They live in ordinary houses and they work… Read More

Many kids daydream about having wings and being able to soar across the sky. Be careful what you wish for. For the narrator, 14-year-old Max, it’s no dream. “Welcome to our nightmare,” she says in her Prologue to the first book in the electric Maximum Ride series. Maximum Ride is… Read More