Ordinary life looks different when magic is introduced, which adds to the allure of books centered around magic realism and fantasy. Imagining other worlds, fantastic creatures, and daring adventures enhances the depth and intrigue of real life. This collection of books is selected for readers ages 8-12 and focuses on magic in several forms. From time travel to innate magical powers, the interpretation of the word “magic” differs from one story to the next. However, the themes of cooperation, friendship, and love prevail, no matter where (or when) protagonists find themselves.
Contributed by: Mary Lanni
Visiting her grandmother in the Louisiana bayou, ten-year-old Maddy begins to realize that she may be the only sibling to carry on the gift of her family’s magical legacy.
When twelve-year-old Cisley’s mother, who controls real magic, disappears during a magic act, Cisley is left with her cold, distant uncle and a great mystery, which will only be solved if she can summon her own magic.
In Brooklyn, nine-year-old Jax joins Ma, a curmudgeonly witch who lives in his building, on a quest to deliver three baby dragons to a magical world, and along the way discovers his true calling.
Exploring a mysterious cave in the mountains behind their house, John and his sister Sarah are shocked to discover they’ve time-traveled to ancient Egypt! Now they must work together to find a way back home from an ancient civilization of golden desert sand and a towering new pyramid, without parents to save them. The adventures abound—cobras, scorpions, a tomb robber, and more! The two kids have to trust each other, make friends who can help, and survive the challenges thrown at them or be stuck in ancient Egypt forever.
A trio of friends from New York City finds themselves trapped inside a mechanical board game that they must dismantle in order to save themselves and generations of other children in this action-packed debut that’s a steampunk Jumanji with a Middle Eastern flair. When twelve-year-old Farah and her two best friends get sucked into a mechanical board game called The Gauntlet of Blood and Sand—a puzzle game akin to a large Rubik’s cube—they know it’s up to them to defeat the game’s diabolical architect in order to save themselves and those who are trapped inside, including her baby brother Ahmed. But first, they have to figure out how. Under the tutelage of a lizard guide named Henrietta Peel and an aeronaut Vijay, Farah, and her friends battle camel spiders, red scorpions, grease monkeys, and sand cats as they prepare to face off with the maniacal Lord Amari, the man behind the machine. Can they defeat Amari at his own game?
Eleven-year-old Miri Gill feels left out in her family, which has two sets of twins and her, until she travels back in time to 1935 and discovers Molly, her own lost twin, and brings her back to the present day.
In a world where everyone possesses magical abilities, powerless twelve-year-old Abby, an Ordinary, is sent to a special school to learn how to negotiate a magical world with her unmagical “disability”—and to avoid becoming a victim of kidnappers, carnivores, and goblins ready to prey upon the Ords.
Up until her twelfth birthday, Kiranmala considered herself an ordinary sixth-grader in Parsippany, New Jersey, but then her parents disappear, and a drooling rakkhosh demon shows up in her kitchen. Soon she is swept into another dimension, full of magic, winged horses, annoying talking birds, and cute princes—and somehow, Kiranmala needs to sort it all out, find her parents, and basically save the world.
Halan is a powerless princess. She is heir to the Magi Kingdom, a blazing desert land ruled by ancient magic. But unlike every royal before her, Halan has no magical powers of her own. Nalah is a powerful pauper. The glassblower’s daughter, Nalah, lives in the land of New Hadar, where magic is strictly outlawed. But Nalah has a powerful force growing within her, one she can’t always control. When a legendary mirror connects them, Nalah and Halan finally meet and must work together to save their two worlds before everything they know is shattered forever.
The Pickles are new to Midnight Gulch, Tennessee, a town which legend says was once magic, but Felicity is convinced the magic is still there, and, with the help of her new friend Jonah the Beedle, she hopes to bring the magic back.
In an antique-filled mansion, sisters Claire and Sophie find a ladder to the magical land of Arden, where wraiths roam freely, unicorns have disappeared, and the guilds of magic no longer trust each other.
Minli, an adventurous girl from a poor village, buys a magical goldfish and then joins a dragon who cannot fly on a quest to find the Old Man of the Moon in hopes of bringing life to Fruitless Mountain and freshness to Jade River.
Thanksgiving is a time when families and friends come together to share food and laughter as the days are getting shorter and colder. Beginning as a celebration of the welcome early European settlers received from Native Americans, Thanksgiving maintains the sentiment of sharing one’s bounty with others. Each home has its own unique traditions, but there are many shared behaviors across the United States, as well. No matter how the holiday is celebrated, the essence is the same: giving thanks for all that one has in their life. This book list includes titles for children aged 4-7 and shows how people give thanks at Thanksgiving and throughout the year. Contributed by: Mary Lanni
When Tuyet finds out that her Vietnamese family is having duck rather than turkey for Thanksgiving dinner, she is upset until she finds out that other children in her class did not eat turkey either.
In rhyming text, when the whole family and guests show up for the big dinner at Grandma’s house, it becomes clear that the house is much too small to hold them all.
I am Thankful
By: Suzy Capozzi
Illustrated by: Eren Unten
Throughout a Thanksgiving Day filled with family and fun, a child finds opportunities to be thankful.
Illustrations and simple, rhyming text reveal a family’s preparations for their Thanksgiving feast, with everyone pitching in to help—including Baby, who sleeps quiet as a mouse.
When he is invited to five Thanksgiving dinners, Turkey accepts all of his friends’ invitations but wonders if he has room in his stomach for all that food.
Families are anything but perfect, but the stories they share are what makes the world beautiful and vibrant. Under the right circumstances, family members confide deep-rooted truths in one another, allowing them to connect more deeply than they could have done before. Often, these connections grow between adult caregivers and their wards, but sometimes they occur between siblings, as well. This book list includes titles for teens ages 13-18 and highlights various family relationships in several unique circumstances. Through these novels, readers can learn more about themselves and the world around them. Contributed by: Mary Lanni
When seventeen-year-old Ginny receives a packet of mysterious envelopes from her favorite aunt, she leaves New Jersey to criss-cross Europe on a sort of scavenger hunt that transforms her life.
In early fourteenth-century China, Oyuna tells her granddaughter of her girlhood in Mongolia and how love for her horse enabled her to win an important race and bring good luck to her family.
When her alcoholic mother abandons her, high school senior Ruby winds up living with Cora, the sister she has not seen for ten years. There, Ruby learns about Cora’s new life, what makes a family, how to allow people to help her when she needs it, and that she too has something to offer others.
Teens Octavia and Tali learn about strength, independence, and courage when they are forced to take a car trip with their grandmother, who tells about growing up Black in 1940s Alabama and serving in Europe during World War II as a member of the Women’s Army Corps.
In 1948, while spending the summer with her aunt in West Virginia to find her family roots, Tilara begins visiting the “colored” old folks’ home called McKendree, makes new friends, and learns to love herself.
Seventeen-year-old Ali is simultaneously swept up in a whirlwind romance and down a rabbit hole of family secrets when another Taiwanese family moves into tiny, predominantly-white, Plainhart, Indiana.
Sixteen-year-old Martha’s life is transformed when her mother leaves her in Laredo, Texas, in 1990 with a grandmother she never knew, who is a revered curandera.
In 1942, fourteen-year-old Jill goes to stay with her grandmother on the coast of Maine, where she is introduced to the often gossipy nature of small-town life and discovers that the war is closer than she thought.
Seventeen-year-old Victoria escapes an abusive father by joining the VanDrexel Family Circus in 1965. Fifty years later, her writings guide her granddaughter, sixteen-year-old Callie, in facing the uncharted waters of public high school.
Fourteen-year-old Clara Luna spends the summer with her grandparents in the tiny, remote village of Yucuyoo, Mexico, learning about her grandmother’s life as a healer, her father’s decision to leave home for the United States, and her own place in the world.
Holly Cather is sent to her aunt’s home in Seattle after the death of her parents, and there she and her twin cousins, Amanda and Nicole, become caught up in an intergenerational feud between rival clans of witches.
When Ryan’s father leaves the family during a midlife crisis, his mother sends him to spend the summer with his aunt in Peggy’s Cove, Nova Scotia, where he learns to fish and gets into trouble.
The Halloween season is the perfect time to read spooky stories. Nights are getting colder and longer and mentions of ghosts seem to be everywhere. Ghost stories are often associated with campfires, marshmallows, and bumps in the night. But sometimes, a ghost story is best read alone. This book list includes twelve riveting ghost stories, all written for readers ages 13-18. Varying in length, style, and level of fright, teen readers who enjoy ghost stories are sure to find a new favorite on this list. Contributed by: Mary Lanni
Seventeen-year-old Denise Farber, her mom, and her stepfather are moving back to New Orleans, into the Argonne house, which is over 100 years old and showing its age, but her mother plans to turn into a bed-and-breakfast. But, old houses have histories, sometimes ghosts, and a mysterious old comic book that Denise finds in the attic may hold the answer to a crime and the terrifying things that keep happening in what she thinks of as the “Agony” house.
For three years, seventeen-year-old Cas Lowood has carried on his father’s work of dispatching the murderous dead, traveling with his kitchen-witch mother and their spirit-sniffing cat. But, everything changes when he meets Anna, a girl unlike any ghost he has faced before.
Anya, embarrassed by her Russian immigrant family and self-conscious about her body, has given up on fitting in at school. However, falling down a well and making friends with the ghost there just may be worse.
Sixteen-year-old Cordelia and her family move into the house they just inherited in Pennsylvania, a former insane asylum the locals call Hysteria Hall. Unfortunately, the house does not want defiant girls like Delia, so it kills her. As she wanders the house, meeting the other ghosts and learning the dark secrets of the Hall, she realizes that she has to find a way to save her sister, parents, and perhaps herself.
Okiku has wandered the world for centuries, freeing the innocent ghosts of the murdered-dead and taking the lives of killers with the vengeance they are due. But when she meets Tark, she knows the moody teen with the series of intricate tattoos is not a monster and needs to be freed from the demonic malevolence that clings to him.
I am Alfonso Jones
By: Tony Medina
Illustrated by: Stacey Robinson and John Jennings
The ghost of fifteen-year-old Alfonso Jones travels in a New York subway car full of the living and the dead, watching his family and friends fight for justice after he is killed by an off-duty police officer while buying a suit in a Midtown department store.
In San Diego in 1918, as deadly influenza and World War I take their toll, sixteen-year-old Mary Shelley Black watches desperate mourners flock to seances and spirit photographers for comfort and, despite her scientific leanings, must consider if ghosts are real when her first love, killed in battle, returns.
There are three rules in the neighborhood: Don’t cry; Don’t snitch; Get revenge. Will takes his dead brother Shawn’s gun and gets in the elevator on the 7th floor. As the elevator stops on each floor, someone connected to Shawn gets on. Someone already dead. Dead by teenage gun violence. And each has something to share with Will.
Teens Jess, Shauna, Kitty, and Anna follow all the rules, but when their summoning circle is broken, the vengeful spirit of Bloody Mary slips through. As the girls struggle to escape Mary’s wrath, loyalties are questioned, friendships are torn apart, and lives are changed forever.
As fifteen-year-old Pemba adjusts to leaving her Brooklyn, New York, home for small-town Connecticut, a Black history researcher helps her understand the paranormal experiences drawing her into the life of a mulatto girl who was once a slave in her house.
Teenage Bina runs away to New York City’s Catherine House, a young women’s residence in Greenwich Village with a tragic history and dark secrets, where she is drawn to her mysterious downstairs neighbor Monet.
Seventeen-year-old Micheline Helsing is a tetrachromat, able to see ghosts in color and capture them on film. But when a routine hunt goes awry, Micheline is infected with a curse known as a soulchain, and if she is unable to exorcise the entity in seven days, she will be destroyed, body and soul.
Latinx voices are important contributors to the fabric of American life. Spanning many countries, people from Latinx backgrounds have a rich and varied history and culture. Latinx Heritage Month, which occurs from September 15 through October 15, is when Americans come together to recognize and celebrate the many contributions of Latinx people. No matter their background, readers of all ages can learn something new about their community members through this book list. These books are specifically geared toward readers ages 8-12 and feature both factual and fictional characters of Latinx heritage. Each story reflects a piece of the Latinx community and provides a means of connection and understanding for all. Contributed by: Mary Lanni
Bold, graphic portraits and beautiful poems present famous and lesser-known Latinos from varied backgrounds who have faced life’s challenges in creative ways.
When his family’s restaurant and Cuban American neighborhood in Miami are threatened by a greedy land developer, thirteen-year-old Arturo, joined by Carmen, a cute poetry enthusiast, fights back, discovering the power of poetry and protest through untold family stories and the work of José Martí.
Twelve-year-old María Luisa O’Neill-Morales (who really prefers to be called Malú) reluctantly moves with her Mexican-American mother to Chicago and starts seventh grade with a bang—violating the dress code with her punk rock aesthetic and spurning the middle school’s most popular girl in favor of starting a band with a group of like-minded misfits.
In 1960s New York, fifth-grader Ruthie, a Cuban-Jewish immigrant, must rely on books, art, her family, and friends in her multicultural neighborhood when an accident puts her in a body cast.
Eleven-year-old Margarito, a big fan of wrestling known as lucha libre, begins to suspect that he has a close connection with his favorite luchador, El Angel de La Guardia, the Guardian Angel.
Eleven-year-old (nearly twelve) Celi Rivera, who is a mix of Black-Puerto Rican-Indigenous Mexican, is secretive about her approaching period and the changes that are happening to her body. She is horrified that her mother wants to hold a traditional public moon ceremony to celebrate the occasion. She must choose loyalty to her life-long best friend, who is contemplating an even more profound change of life or the boy she likes.
Red Panda and Moon Bear, magical defenders of their community, battle ghosts, evil robots, alien invaders, and time portals, all before Mami and Papi get home.
Cuba, 1961: Two years after the communist revolution, Lucia still leads a carefree life, dreaming of parties and her first crush. But when the soldiers come to her small town, everything begins to change. Suddenly the revolution hits home. Freedoms are stripped away. Neighbors disappear. Her friends feel like strangers. And her family is being watched. As the revolution’s impact becomes more oppressive, Lucia’s parents make the heart-wrenching decision to send her and her little brother to the United States—alone. Suddenly plunked down in Nebraska with well-meaning strangers, Lucia struggles to adapt to a new country, a new language, a new way of life. But what of her old life? Will she ever see her home or her parents again? And if she does, will she still be the same girl?
In the Dominican Republic, a boy who dreams of playing professional baseball in the United States crosses paths with a young environmentalist from Minneapolis who is passionate about saving bees.
Mexican-American Stef Soto is hoping to break free from her overprotective parents and embarrassing reputation from her family’s taco truck business, but she soon learns that family, friendship, and the taco truck are important and wonderful parts of her life.
A collection of short stories featuring Latin Americans allows readers to experience life through their eyes, celebrate their victories, and see their hardships.
Eleven-year-old Eddie Aguado is convinced that winning the 14th Annual Arne Hopkins Dock Fishing Tournament (once he actually learns how to fish) will bring him closer to his dad, who died when Eddie was only five.
Every culture in the world has its own heritage and history. No matter where one lives, their unique heritage remains important and deserves to be celebrated! Whether or not it is officially recognized in a national month or day, heritage is vitally important to the complexity and depth of human society. Learning about different cultures and why they are special prepares children to interact with others who may come from different backgrounds and do so from a place of respect and understanding. This book list is designed to help with this learning and includes books from a variety of cultures that celebrate each one’s unique heritage. These books are best suited to readers ages 4-7. Contributed by: Mary Lanni
A Navajo family welcomes a new baby into the family with love and ceremony, eagerly waiting for that first special laugh. Includes a brief description of birth customs in different cultures.
Explores the previously uncelebrated but pivotal contributions of NASA’s African American women mathematicians to America’s space program, describing how Jim Crow laws segregated them despite their groundbreaking successes.
Aneel and his grandfather, Dada-ji, tell stories, use their imaginations, and make delicious roti, a traditional Indian flatbread.
Islandborn
By: Junot Díaz
Illustrated by: Leo Espinoza
Lola was just a baby when her family left the Island, so when she has to draw it for a school assignment, she asks her family, friends, and neighbors about their memories of her homeland and in the process, comes up with a new way of understanding her own heritage.
When his mother sends him to the market to buy necessities for the upcoming festival, Lin Yi is certain his bargaining skills will get him the best prices, and he will have money left over for his coveted red rabbit lantern.
One rainy day, Peekaboo, the poi dog, is feeling restless and is looking for a new game to play. She asks her mother for guidance, leading her on an unexpected imaginary journey across the state of Hawaii. Along the way, Peekaboo encounters wonderful people and creatures while visiting many well-known Hawaiian landmarks: From the Pali lookout to the snowy mountain top of Mauna Kea, Big Island’s highest volcano, her adventures are filled with excitement, discoveries, and enjoyment.
Pepe wakes up energized to attend his first Hispanic Day parade. With new food to taste, music to dance to, and a parade to watch, Pepe couldn’t be more excited to celebrate and share his Hispanic heritage. Many of Pepe’s friends also attend the festival, celebrating their own Hispanic ties. Mexican, Dominican, Panamanian, Colombian, Honduran, Nicaraguan, Chilean, Puerto Rican, Salvadoran, Guatemalan, and Cuban cultures are all represented in the parade. A day filled with joy and pride, Pepe and the Parade is a jubilant celebration of culture and identity.
After a wonderful summer spent visiting her grandmother, Suki decides to wear her blue cotton kimono on her first day of school, where she also shares with her class tales of going to the street festival with her beloved obachan.
Little Thunder wants a name that separates him from his father, Big Thunder, and considers such options as “Touch the Sky” and “Drums, Drums, and More Drums” before his father helps him find the perfect alternative.
Throughout history, underground movements have aided, freed, and saved the lives of numerous groups of people. As the Nazis overcame cities and countries throughout Europe, many citizens fought back by forming underground movements, named Resistance groups. Each of the titles in our list looks at the brave young people who joined the Resistance groups, whether knowingly or not, and the impact it had on them, their families, their friends, and their community.
Twelve-year-old Marcel loves riding his bicycle, and dreams of competing in the Tour de France, but it is 1942 and German soldiers are everywhere, stopping him as he delivers bread from his parents’ bakery around Aucoin. One day he discovers that it is not just bread he is delivering, and suddenly he finds himself in possession of dangerous secrets about his parents and his new friend from Paris, Delphine.
Pearl Witherington Cornioley, one of the most celebrated female World War II resistance fighters, shares her remarkable story in this firsthand account of her experience as a special agent for the British Special Operations Executive (SOE). Told through a series of reminiscences–from a difficult childhood spent in the shadow of World War I and her family’s harrowing escape from France as the Germans approached in 1940, to her recruitment and training as a special agent, and the logistics of parachuting into a remote rural area of occupied France and hiding in a wheat field from enemy fire–each chapter also includes helpful opening remarks to provide context and background on the SOE and the French Resistance.
Despite the horrors of World War II, a French teenager pursues her dream of becoming an opera singer, which takes her to places where she gains information about what the Nazis are doing–information that the French Resistance needs.
In August 1939 Genevieve makes an impulsive decision not to get on a train to take her to a boat back to New York and must spend the duration of World War II with her grandmother in a small village in Alsace, France, where she becomes involved with the French resistance.
In Amsterdam, 1943, Hanneke spends her days procuring and delivering sought after black market goods to paying customers, her nights hiding the true nature of her work from her concerned parents, and every waking moment mourning her boyfriend, who was killed on the Dutch front lines when the Germans invaded. She likes to think of her illegal work as a small act of rebellion against the Nazis. On a routine delivery, a client asks Hanneke for help. Expecting to hear that Mrs. Janssen wants meat or kerosene, Hanneke is shocked by the older woman’s frantic plea to find a person, a Jewish teenager Mrs. Janssen had been hiding, who has vanished without a trace from a secret room. Hanneke initially wants nothing to do with such dangerous work but is ultimately drawn into a web of mysteries and stunning revelations that lead her into the heart of the resistance, open her eyes to the horrors of the Nazi war machine, and compel her to take desperate action.
In German-occupied Normandy, France, fifteen-year-old Marianne worries that her mother is exposing the family, especially Marianne’s deaf younger brother, to great danger by volunteering for more perilous assignments in the resistance movement.
In 1942 sixteen-year-old Chaya Lindner is a Jewish girl living in Nazi-occupied Poland and a courier who smuggles food and documents to the isolated Jewish ghettos in southern Poland. When a mission goes wrong and many of her colleagues are arrested she finds herself on a journey to Warsaw, where an uprising is in the works.
Paul and Marie’s bucolic French town is almost untouched by the ravages of WWII. When the Jewish parents of their friend Henri disappear, and Henri goes into hiding, Paul and Marie realize they must take a stand.
In Nazi-occupied Norway, fourteen-year-old Espen joins the resistance movement, graduating from deliverer of illegal newspapers to courier and spy. Includes historical note, code-breaking activity, and instructions for making invisible ink.
In England in 1995, fifteen-year-old Tamar, grief-stricken by the puzzling death of her beloved grandfather, slowly begins to uncover the secrets of his life in the Dutch resistance during the last year of the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands, and the climactic events that forever cast a shadow on his life and that of his family.
When World War II breaks out seventeen-year-old Betty, an American studying in England, trains as a spy and parachutes into German-occupied France to join the Resistance, but after meeting a young American pilot she begins to realize fully the brutality of the war and their dangerous position.
In January 1945, fifteen-year-old Tygo Winter, a locksmith’s son who has been forced by the Nazis to loot abandoned Dutch homes, finds himself protecting a Jewish girl he has found in a villa, and in possession of information about a German super-weapon that the Nazi high command plans to use to defeat the Allied forces in the Battle of the Bulge–information that the Resistance wants.
While evacuating her grandmother during Hurricane Sandy, twelve-year-old Lily discovers that her Granny Collette has a mysterious past in France during WWII. The story alternates between Brooklyn in 2012 and German-occupied Brume in 1944.
Some women are born into royalty while others enter through marriage. Below are 12 books about real-life princesses that describe their lives, good and bad, and what it means to be a princess in various countries throughout history.
Examines the life and legacy of Princess Malinali, a Nahuatl princess from the coast lands of Tabasco who used her knowledge of Maya, Nahuatl, and Spanish languages to act as an interpreter when her kingdom was at war with the Aztec Empire.
This collective biography offers portraits of six women, who lived in times ranging from 3500 years ago to now. Each minibiography provides birth and death dates, if known, for its subject, and then offers a chronicle of the highlights of her life, including details of youth, family, and ascension to various positions of power, whether it be ruler, consort, or government minister.
Presents information about the life of the fourteenth-century Persian noblewoman who was captured and sold into slavery as a child, but whose intelligence, beauty, and compassion led her to become princess, and eventually sole ruler of Kirman after the death of her husband.
Before Diana, Princess of Wales, there was Princess Grace of Monaco. Both were blonde, blue-eyed beauties; both died in tragic car crashes; and both will live on in the hearts of millions.
