“What are you reading?” adults ask…
“What books do you recommend?” kids ask…
Well, friends, here you go!
(To read my reviews of these books, find me on GoodReads.)
TOO BRIGHT TO SEE
by Kyle Lukoff
"It’s strange living in our old house, now that Uncle Roderick is dead."
WHEN YOU TRAP A TIGER
by Tae Keller
"I wrap myself in invisibility and rest my forehead against the back-seat window, watching raindrops slide down the side of our old station wagon."
HEARTLESS
by Marissa Meyer
"Cheshire opened one eye, slitted and unamused."
HOOT
by Carl Hiaasen
"It was then, squinting through the smudged glass, that Roy spotted the strange boy running along the sidewalk."
GHOST BOYS
by Jewell Parker Rhodes
"How small I look. Laid out flat, my stomach touching ground."
THE GIRL WHO DRANK THE MOON
by Kelly Barnhill
"Yes. There is a witch in the woods. There has always been a witch."
The Witch’s Boy
by Kelly Barnhill
"The wrong boy was barely alive."
GHOST
by Jason Reynolds
"My mom and I kept running, down the staircase into the street, breaking into the darkness with death chasing behind us."
PIECING ME TOGETHER
by Renee Watson
"When I learned the Spanish word for succeed, I thought it was kind of ironic that the word exit is embedded in it."
HELLO, UNIVERSE
by Erin Entrada Kelly
"Lola was old and her fingers felt like paper, but she sliced mangoes like an artist."
LONG WAY DOWN
by Jason Reynolds
"Don’t nobody believe nothing these days
which is why I haven’t told nobody the story I’m about to tell you"
Foxcraft: The Taken
by Inbali Iserles
"I cast my voice to the twisted tails of the grass stems, to the fence, and the earth, and the clouds that gathered at the edges of the sky, mimicking the creature as best I could."
DOLL BONES
by Holly Black
"Poppy set down one of the mermaid dolls close to the stretch of asphalt road that represented the Blackest Sea."
RAYMIE NIGHTINGALE
by Kate DiCamillo
"The lake, Lake Clara -- where someone named Clara Wingtip had managed to drown herself a hundred years ago -- gleamed and glittered. The lake looked hungry."
PAX
by Sara Pennypacker
"The fox felt the car slow before the boy did, as he felt everything first."
THE JUNGLE BOOK
by Rudyard Kipling
"It was the noise that bewilders woodcutters and gypsies sleeping in the open, and makes them run sometimes into the very mouth of the tiger."
ESPERANZA RISING
by Pam Munoz Ryan
"Did you know that when you lie down on the land, you can feel it breathe? You can feel its heart beating?"
GHOST HAWK
by Susan Cooper
"He had left his canoe in the river, tied to a branch of a low-growing cherry tree."
THE TIGER RISING
by Kate DiCamillo
"That morning, after he discovered the tiger, Rob went and stood under the Kentucky Star Motel sign and waited for the school bus just like it was any other day."
THIS ONE SUMMER
by Jillian & Mariko Tamaki
"The first time I ever saw a milkweed was on the beach at Awago. I thought they were magic pods. I thought that if we ate them, the fluff would make us grow wings."
TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD
by Harper Lee
"I wanted you to see what real courage is, instead of getting the idea that courage is a man with a gun in his hand. It's when you know you're licked before you begin but you begin anyway and you see it through no matter what. You rarely win, but sometimes you do."
MAUS
by Art Spiegelman
"She was a survivor too, like most of my parents' friends."
ALL THE BRIGHT PLACES
by Jennifer Niven
"Finch's Rules For Wandering: 1. There are no rules, because life is made up of too many rules as it is."
OUT OF MY MIND
by Sharon M. Draper
"My parents have always blanketed me with conversation. They scattered and babbled. They verbalized and vocalized. My father sang to me. My mother whispered her strength into my ear."
I'LL GIVE YOU THE SUN
by Jandy Nelson
"So we grapple with the mysteries, each in our own way. And some of us get to float around on one of them and call it home."
LIAR & SPY
by Rebecca Stead
"You should really look for cars," I tell him.
"We're a team now," he says. "You were looking for both of us."
And then he waves and walks off.
THE MIRACULOUS JOURNEY OF EDWARD TULANE
by Kate DiCamillo
"If you have no intention of loving or being loved, then the whole journey is pointless."
BRIDGE TO TERABITHIA
by Katherine Paterson
"He grabbed the end of the rope and swung out toward the other bank with a kind of wild exhilaration and landed gently on his feet, taller and stronger and wiser in that mysterious land."
ELEANOR & PARK
by Rainbow Rowell
"Eleanor... Standing behind him until he turned his head. Lying next to him just before he woke up."
THE CROSSOVER
by Kwame Alexander
"Never let anyone lower your goals. Others' expectations of you are determined by their limitations of life. The sky is your limit, sons."
ENDER'S GAME
by Orson Scott Card
"Maybe knowing about the craziness means you don't have to fall for it."
THE TIGER RISING
by Kate DiCamillo
"Willie May nodded her head but she wasn't listening. She was looking past Rob, past the white sheet, past the laundry room, past the Kentucky Star. 'Who don't?' she said finally. 'Who don't know something in a cage?' "
NIGHTINGALE'S NEST
by Nikki Loftin
"The notes were high and liquid, a honey-soft river of sound that seeped right through me."
TUCK EVERLASTING
by Nattalie Babbitt
"The first week of August hangs at the very top of summer, the top of the live-long year, like the highest seat of a Ferris wheel when it pauses in its turning."
THE MYSTERIOUS BENEDICT SOCIETY
by Trenton Lee Stewart
"Far to the north a foghorn groaned, reaching them less as a sound than as a trembling in their bellies, as if their bodies were pipes in a somber old organ."
WHEN I WAS THE GREATEST
by Jason Reynolds
"I remember watching him pop his head up from a different torn comic-book page, and his notepad, to watch the kids play in the hydrant."
HARRIET THE SPY
by Louise Fitzhugh
"Tears never bring anything back. Life is a struggle and a good spy gets in there and fights. Remember that."
HANSEL & GRETEL
by Neil Gaiman & Lorenzo Mattotti
"This all happened a long time ago, in your grandmother's time, or in her grandfather's. A long time ago. Back then, we all lived on the edge of the great forest."
THE BOY IN THE BLACK SUIT
by Jason Reynolds
"It's so weird how a person can be a normal part of your everyday life, and then just disappear. And when they do, you realize that some of those everyday things go with them."
WILDWOOD
by Colin Meloy
"How five crows managed to lift a twenty-pound baby boy into the air was beyond Prue, but that was certainly the last of her worries."
GOBLIN SECRETS
by William Alexander
"There was a kind of fish that swam in Southside dust, and a kind of bird that fished with their long beaks in the dust dunes."
MOCKINGBIRD
by Kathryn Erskine
"It looks like a one-winged bird crouching in the corner of our living room."
THE THING ABOUT LUCK
by Cynthia Kadohata
"Something started to happen: The dust of my personality started to settle, and my fear left me."
NIGHTMARES!
by Jason Segel and Kristen Miller
"'I won't eat all of you,' Agatha said. 'Just a few little pieces you don't really need.'"
COUNTING BY 7s
by Holly Goldberg Sloan
"It felt as if I were going up and over some kind of barrier after spending too long hitting the thing straight on."
SAVVY
by Ingrid Law
"In most ways, Mibs, we Beaumonts are just like other people. We get born, and sometime later we die. And in between, we're happy and sad, we feel love and we feel fear, we eat and we sleep and we hurt like everyone else."
THE FAULT IN OUR STARS
by John Green
"Some infinities are bigger than other infinities."
A YEAR DOWN YONDER
by Richard Peck
"Spring and I stirred."
THE LION, THE WITCH AND THE WARDROBE
by C.S. Lewis
"And she stopped looking at the dazzling brightness of the frozen river with all its waterfalls of ice and at the white masses of the tree-tops and could only watch the little short legs of Mr. Beaver going pad-pad-pad-pad through the snow in front of her as if they were never going to stop."
A SINGLE SHARD
by Linda Sue Park
"Crane-man's words came to life -- the King standing where Tree-ear stood now, surrounded by the palace women... the enemy scrambling up the path he had just followed... the cries of the women -- their terror and then their sudden act of bravery, their colored dresses like the petals of thousands of flowers."
SPIRIT'S KEY
by Edith Cohn
"'I need this eagle out of my house.' Mrs. Borse picks up the rifle resting on the wall by the bed."
BUD, NOT BUDDY
by Christopher Paul Curtis
"It's at six that grown folks don't think you're a cute little kid anymore, they talk to you and expect you understand everything they mean."
BROWN GIRL DREAMING
by Jacqueline Woodson
"And somewhere else James Baldwin is writing about injustice, each novel, each essay, changing the world."
CRISPIN: CROSS OF LEAD
by Avi
"In life she had been a small woman of little strength. Death made her even less."
ROOFTOPPERS
by Katherine Rundell
"On the morning of its first birthday, a baby was found floating in a cello case in the middle of the English Channel."
KIRA-KIRA
by Cynthia Kadohata
"That's how I learned about eyes, sky and ocean: three special, deep, colored, see-through things."
THE HIGHER POWER OF LUCKY
by Susan Patron
"Her ear near a hole in the paint-chipped wall of Hard Pan's Found Object Wind Chime Museum and Visitor Center, she listened as Short Sammy told the story of how he hit rock bottom."
CRISS CROSS
by Lynne Rae Perkins
"The other people swarmed from the parking lot up onto a sidewalk and down a trail of evenly spaced pools of light."
WONDER
by R.J. Palacio
"Mr. Browne's precept for October was: Your deeds are your monuments."
DEAD END IN NORVELT
by Jack Gantos
"I lifted my binoculars back toward the movie."
MOON OVER MANIFEST
by Clare Vanderpool
"The ground came quick and hard, but I landed and rolled as the train lumbered on without a thank-you or goodbye."
THE ONE AND ONLY IVAN
by Katherine Applegate
"Humans waste words. They toss them like banana peels and leave them to rot."
THE CITY OF EMBER
by Jeanne DuPrau
"His gray, drooping face appeared to be made of something stiffer than ordinary skin; it rarely moved except for making the smile that was on it now."
FLORA & ULYSSES
by Kate DiCamillo
"'This malfeasance must be stopped,' was what the unassuming janitor Alfred T. Slipper always said before he was transformed into the amazing Incandesto and became a towering, crime-fighting pillar of light."
JULIE OF THE WOLVES
by Jean Craighead George
"Miyax pushed back the hood of her sealskin parka and looked at the Arctic sun. It was a yellow disc in a lime-green sky, the colors of six o'clock in the evening and the time when the wolves awoke."
THE GRAVEYARD BOOK
by Neil Gaiman
"There was a hand in the darkness, and it held a knife."
THE WINTER ROOM
by Gary Paulsen
"Summer starts slow. You don't really see the work coming."
NINTH WARD
by Jewell Parker Rhodes
"This morning, though, Mama Ya-Ya frowned at the mirror like she could see some other world inside it. 'Mr. Death is losing patience. He'll come and ferry me down the Mississippi. I'll put on my feathered hat. Wave like I'm in a Mardi Gras parade.'"
INSIDE OUT & BACK AGAIN
by Thanhha Lai
"Maybe soldiers will no longer patrol our neighborhood, maybe I can jump rope after dark, maybe the whistles that tell Mother to push us under the bed will stop screeching."
NUMBER THE STARS
by Lois Lowry
"The war would end."
BECAUSE OF WINN-DIXIE
by Kate DiCamillo
"I wondered if my mama, wherever she was, had a tree full of bottles; and I wondered if I was a ghost to her, the same way she sometimes seemed like a ghost to me."
THE MAGICIAN'S ELEPHANT
by Kate DiCamillo
"And then she realized that no, no, it was the earth that she was flying over, and that she was looking not at the stars but at the creatures of the world, and that they were all, they were each-- beggars, dogs, orphans, kings, elephants, soldiers -- emitting pulses of light."
DEAR MR.HENSHAW
by Beverly Cleary
"Dear Mr. Henshaw, I'm the boy who wrote to you last year when I was in the second grade. Maybe you didn't get my letter."
HATCHET
by Gary Paulsen
"And there was the tenderness in her voice that she had when he was small, the tenderness that she had when he was small and sick, with a cold, and she put her hand on his forehead, and the burning came into his eyes again and he had turned away from her and looked out the window, forgotten the hatchet on his belt and so arrived at the plane with the hatchet still on his belt."
ISLAND OF THE BLUE DOLPHIN
by Scott O'Dell
"But Ramo's eyes missed little in the world. They were black like a lizard's and very large and, like the eyes of a lizard, could sometimes look sleepy. This was the time when they saw the most."
ROLL OF THUNDER, HEAR MY CRY
by Mildred D. Taylor
"Before us the narrow, sun-splotched road wound like a lazy red serpent dividing the high forest bank of quiet, old trees on the left from the cotton field, forested by giant green and purple stalks, on the right."
WHEN YOU REACH ME
by Rebecca Stead
"Annemarie's apartment didn't involve keys. Instead she had a doorman who slapped her five and a dad who opened the door upstairs."
THE PHANTOM TOOBOOTH
by Norton Juster
"Into the cavern rushed eight of the strongest miners carrying an immense caldron which bubbled and sizzled and sent great clouds of savory steam spiraling slowly to the ceiling."
CADDIE WOODLAWN
by Carol Ryrie Brink
"Soon three bundles, three dirty faces, and three fiery heads, shining in the red autumn sun, crossed the river with a little trail of ripples behind them."
HOLES
by Louis Sachar
"'My mother was once a Girl Scout,' said Zero.
'I thought you said you didn't have a mother.'
'Everybody has to have a mother.'
'Well, yeah, I know that.'
'She said she once won a prize for selling the most Girl Scout cookies,' said Zero. 'She was real proud of that.'
Stanley peeled off another layer of his onion."
FROM THE MIXED-UP FILES OF MRS. BASIL E. FRANKWEILER
by E.L. Koningsberg
"Claudia took a step closer to me. 'You really do have beautiful eyes. They're like looking into a kaleidoscope--the way those golden flecks in them keep catching the light.' She was quite close to me now and actually peering into my face. It was uncomfortable. I put a stop to that."
THE GIVER
by Lois Lowry
"Tiny, cold, featherlike feelings peppered his body and face. He put out his tongue again, and caught one of the dots of cold upon it."
A WRINKLE IN TIME
by Madeleine L'Engle
"A whirl of darkness. An icy cold blast. An angry, resentful howl that seemed to tear through her. Darkness again."
JAMES AND THE GIANT PEACH
by Roald Dahl
"'Crocodile tongues!' he cried. 'One thousand long slimy crocodile tongues boiled up in the skull of a dead witch for twenty days and nights with the eyeballs of a lizard! Add the fingers of a young monkey, the gizzard of a pig, the beak of a green parrot, the juice of a porcupine, and three spoonfuls of sugar. Stew for another week, and then let the moon do the rest!'"
CORALINE
by Neil Gaiman
"Coraline discovered the door a little while after they moved into the house."
THE LION, THE WITCH, AND THE WARDROBE
by C.S. Lewis
"Bless me, what do they teach them at these schools?" -- The Professor
GREGOR THE OVERLANDER
by Suzanne Collins
"'Great, Day One and I'm looking forward to a trip to the laundry room,' Gregor thought. 'By September, I'll probably be ecstatic when we get the phone bill."
PETER PAN
by J.M. Barrie
"Mrs. Darling first heard of Peter when she was tidying up her children's minds. It is the nightly custom of every good mother after her children are asleep to rummage in their minds and put things straight for next morning, repacking into their proper places the many articles that have wandered during the day."
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