Charlie Joe Jackson doesn’t like to read. He never has. In fact, he is proud of his record of never having completely read any book assigned to him. He does, however, believe in getting good grades, and he shares how to do this along with many other tips in Charlie Joe Jackson’s Guide to Not Reading, a delightful choice for reluctant readers.

Charlie Joe tells us that he is writing this book to help other “non-readers” like himself—and we believe he is doing it out of the kindness of his heart—but in truth, there is a wonderful twist to the ending that reveals why he is really writing this book. His long-term scheme for avoiding reading any book in its entirety has fallen apart, and he is forced (he believes) into coming up with another plan. Those of us who love to read will wonder why he doesn’t simply read the assigned book, since it would take less effort than his elaborate tactics for not reading, but Charlie Joe has a reputation to maintain and he will not let it go. Along the way he learns about friendships and the value of honesty—and honest work—and we learn to love his irascible self.

Tommy Greenwald’s writing style is breezy and accessible without being too easy. It is also extremely funny and hard to put down. If the book’s cover showed something blowing up, every reluctant boy reader in middle school would be proud to carry it around while secretly enjoying the nonviolent, straightforward story. Bookworms won’t care; they’ll love it either way.

Middle school can be a minefield, and Rachel Renée Russell does a super job of capturing the daily dilemmas of one particular middle schooler in Dork Diaries 3: Tales from a Not-So-Talented Pop Star.

Nikki Maxwell has only been at her new private school for a few months, but she has made some great friends and one very powerful enemy, Mackenzie Hollister. In her diary, Nikki shares her deepest thoughts and works out her day-to-day challenges. Filled with a roller coaster of emotions and plenty of drawings to keep the story moving, the diary provides a clear picture of talented but unconfident Nikki, who worries that others will find out her deep secrets: She is on full scholarship at the tony school; her father is an exterminator; and she was caught on Mackenzie’s cell phone singing and dancing with her little sister at a pizza joint. When Mackenzie schemes to steal Nikki’s BFFs and ruin her chances to win the school talent show, Nikki pulls herself together. 

Dork Diaries has become something of a Wimpy Kid for girls, offering new ways to deal with the challenges of middle school life. Girls who are struggling with their social lives will empathize and laugh along with Nikki, who may not be a pop star just yet but is winning the hearts of young readers everywhere.

John Grisham’s first novel for kids, Theodore Boone: Kid Lawyer, provided young readers with a fast-paced mystery, an introduction to courtroom practices and a cast of memorable characters. 

In that story, we met 13-year-old Theo, a kid who is so obsessed with the law that he has his own office at home and helps friends with their legal problems—from figuring out how to get a dog out of the pound via animal court, to explaining custody law to a kid whose parents are going through a divorce. Theo’s legal interest comes naturally; he is the only child of two attorneys, and he longs to become a lawyer (or a judge) someday himself. 

In Theo’s first adventure, the plot thickens when he discovers an eyewitness to a murder trial, and the newest installation, Theodore Boone: The Abduction, is no less thrilling. The excitement grips readers from the very first page, when Theo’s friend April is abducted in the middle of the night—and it’s up to Theo to figure out what happened. Who says a 13-year-old can’t investigate a crime better than the police can?

If they haven’t already, readers young and old will embrace the smart and spirited Theo Boone—and eagerly anticipate future entries in this delightful series from the king of legal thrillers. 

At the beginning of this story, almost-11-year-old Lexie’s mom tells her, “A big part of growing up is dealing with things we don’t like.” What she doesn’t tell her is how to deal with those things. This is something Lexie must discover for herself while on vacation with her father at the family beach house.

Lexie’s parents divorced about a year earlier, and as much as she dislikes going to the beach without her mom, she is looking forward to some time alone with her father. It isn’t until they arrive, however, that her dad tells her that his girlfriend is coming as well. And just when Lexie thinks she can get past this new thing that she doesn’t like, she finds that the girlfriend has brought her sons, Harris and Ben, too.

The reader can feel the tension mount as everyone tries to make a “nice vacation” and no one talks about the changes in their families. There are glimpses of Lexie learning how to make decisions for herself, especially when she realizes “that somebody had to stand up for me and I guess it had to be me.” But she says nothing until young Harris lets it slip that her father and his mother are planning to get married. We are as relieved as Lexie when she finally confronts her father and clears the air.

Lexie is a sweet, short story that will appeal particularly to young girls. Newbery Honor-winning author Audrey Couloumbis very deftly shows us the growth of her character in the passing of just a few days. Yes, growing up is dealing with things we don’t like, and Lexie will show you how to do it.

Alice Rice is nine (going on 10), and likes things to be the way they are supposed to be: neat, organized, simple. Unfortunately, in Kevin Henkes’ Junonia, nothing goes as planned. On their annual trip to Sanibel Island in Florida, Alice and her family discover that most of the people who usually join them for their visit are staying at home—and the one family friend who will be coming is bringing her new boyfriend and his six-year-old daughter, Mallory.

The one thing Alice loves above all else is hunting for seashells along the beach. She will pick up any shell but is most interested in rare shells, especially the Junonia. Shell hunting changes, though, when Alice is made to hunt with grumpy, whiny Mallory and her tattered doll Munchkey. Yet soon Mallory and Alice begin to see they may have something in common.

Henkes’ heartwarming story is enriched by his beautiful illustrations on the endpapers and at the beginning of each chapter. He creates a very full book in relatively few pages through his well-chosen words. Like Alice finding rare shells on the beach, readers will find rich, evocative, image-filled language sprinkled throughout the book: Alice’s hands have that “wonderful, warm sunscreen smell” and the ocean crests are as “strips of lace laid out on folds of steel blue cloth.”

Junonia’s plot builds quietly, with the gentle crests and valleys of the ocean on a breezy day. Henkes relies not on twists and jerks to tear your breath from you, but instead on lushly worded phrases and tender moments between families to take your breath away.

 More than a decade after first meeting May Amelia in the Newbery Honor book Our Only May Amelia (1999), readers will again find themselves rooting for the girl with spunk and spirit who navigates a river of difficulties to find her place in a land dominated by “trees and cows and sheep and bears and brothers.”

In The Trouble with May Amelia, being born and raised “in the middle of nowhere” on Washington State’s Nasel River in 1900 is trouble enough. Even more trouble comes from being the only girl on a farm with a herd of seven brothers. Add to that a Pappa who finds girls useless, particularly one who does not meet his expectations of what “A Proper Young Lady” should be, and May Amelia Jackson is “in Trouble Forever.”  

The Jackson farm is situated among a community of hard-working Finnish immigrants. Not all the adults speak English fluently and contact with outsiders is infrequent. It is the turn of the century and settling undeveloped areas of America is often difficult: Bears and cougars threaten the Jackson’s livestock; logs from the logging camp regularly barrel downstream and become life-threatening to anyone on the river; and doctors and medicine are not close at hand. The worst difficulty comes for 12-year-old May when a man in a suit shows up and convinces Pappa, with May’s translation services, to invest in a plan to develop Nasel into a boomtown. The Jackson family, and many others who follow Pappa’s lead, lose everything when the plan is exposed as fraudulent. Pappa’s sole source of blame for the family’s ruin is the translator herself, May Amelia. With guts and courage, May Amelia overcomes Pappa’s blame and the community’s hopelessness, and the reader will be compelled to cheer when she finally does.

Using stories from her own Finnish immigrant family, Jennifer L. Holm recreates an unforgettable character whose adventures will have young readers wishing they could run right alongside May. Wilbert, May’s best brother, often compares her to an irritating grain of sand in an oyster, and after reading The Trouble with May Amelia, the reader’s reward is a genuine pearl.

In the barest sense, this is a fantasy book with all the elements you might expect, but as any happy reader knows, it is not the story that makes the book so much as how it is written. The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making is a mouthful of a title, but the prose throughout this book is wonderful—a “mouthful” in the most satisfying sense. Award-winning author Catherynne M. Valente writes beautifully with a rich and deep vocabulary that is every bit as enjoyable as the plot of the story.

September, the 12-year-old protagonist, is a perfectly ordinary girl, bored with her perfectly ordinary life, who eagerly accepts the offer of the Green Wind to bear her away to Fairyland. Here she meets the creatures you would expect (witches, fairies, pookas) as well as many original ones, including a wyverary (a wyvern whose father is a library). In her quest for a witch’s stolen spoon, she is also sent by the evil Marquess to bring back a magical sword that only September can retrieve.

September wonders at one point if she is in a merry tale or a serious one, but the narrator cautions us that “no one may know the shape of the tale in which they move.” However, she will learn that the choices she makes have everything to do with how her life will unfold. When September first arrives in the land of Fairy, she sees signposts directing her to lose her way, lose her life, lose her mind or lose her heart. She chooses (sensibly, considering) to follow the path where she will lose her heart, and, as a reader, you will lose your heart as well as you revel in Valente’s writing. Recommend this book to advanced readers in middle school. They will appreciate the challenge and love the story.

Twelve-year old twins Jackaran and Jaidith Shield are complete opposites. Jack has dark eyes and hair, Jaide has light. Jack can run faster than his sister, but Jaide can jump higher. They do, however, have one thing in common—they’re both troubletwisters. In this first book in a new series by Garth Nix and Sean Williams, Jack and Jaide are sent to live with their grandmother after their house explodes under some very strange circumstances. And they are about to find out just how strange things can get.

As soon as Jack and Jaide arrive at Grandma X’s house, nothing seems right. Weather vanes point in the wrong direction, and doors and signs disappear from around the house without warning. Perhaps strangest of all, Grandma X’s cats start talking to the twins. However, it is not until they see Grandma X creating whirlwinds inside the house and controlling thousands of white-eyed rats that they begin to realize that things are not just strange, but possibly dangerous. Will Grandma X help them, or is she behind the Evil that is threatening to steal Jack and Jaide away?

Troubletwisters is an exciting beginning to what promises to be a fast-paced series. Although this book is very different from Nix’s The Seventh Tower and The Keys to the Kingdom series, fans of those books will enjoy the action, magic and suspense that Nix and Williams both write so well. This is a perfect book for both boys and girls who enjoy fantasy set in the “real” world. For all their differences, Jack and Jaide are equally strong characters, and they work together to create a story that can be enjoyed by anyone.

“The Penderwick Family was being torn apart,” begins this third entry in Jeanne Birdsall’s always delightful Penderwick series (the first having won the National Book Award). For three of the four energetic Penderwick sisters, this means spending two weeks with their Aunt Claire at Point Mouette, Maine, while their father and his new wife are honeymooning in England. The oldest daughter, Rosalind, will be separated from her sisters for the first time as she heads to the New Jersey shore with a classmate.

Skye is worried that she doesn’t have what it takes to be OAP (Oldest Available Penderwick). Her OAP-dom is indeed tested when five-year-old Batty needs constant supervision and Aunt Claire sprains her ankle, requiring help from Alec, the musician next door. Meanwhile, Jane, usually content to pen Sabrina Starr tales, falls in love for the first time and experiences writer’s block, causing no-nonsense, budding astrophysicist Skye to muse, “Killer asteroids, a frozen Earth, the end to humanity—all this was much easier to handle than a besotted sister.” Yet perhaps the biggest surprise in this summer of adventures is when some of the Penderwicks begin to notice that their musically talented friend Jeffrey, who has never known his biological father, resembles Alec.

Amid the beauty of New England, where a moose and her twin babies make appearances, time seems to slow down, with only a brief mention of a cell phone to remind readers that The Penderwicks at Point Mouette takes place in the present day. With exquisite descriptions, charms reminiscent of a bygone era and the Penderwicks’ endearing loyalty, Birdsall’s gentle stories—destined to become classics—continue to get better. Readers can only hope that her best one yet isn’t her last.

Ever wanted a pet so badly you’d promise to do anything to get one? Anna and her brother, Tom, have been pestering their mom seemingly forever, to no avail. They already have New Cat (Old Cat was run over), but they desperately want a hamster. They’ve tried everything—begging, praying in church and even asking their sick Nana to lobby for them. But it isn’t until Nana dies that Mom comes around.

Even though Mom has an unfortunate history with rascally rodents, she finally agrees to let the kids have Russian Dwarf hamsters. In an unexpected turn of events, she agrees to buy not one, but two(!)—insisting, of course, that both pets be the same gender.

Fate has a way of intervening, however, and when Number One and Number Two reproduce, Anna and Tom are elated . . . until they wake up to find the hideous and disturbing “great hamster massacre.” With Number One missing a leg and Number Two just missing, the siblings and their next-door neighbor Suzanne launch a full-scale investigation of the monstrosity. Who are the likely suspects? Will they ever be brought to justice? And what will become of the empty cage and silent hamster wheel?
This debut novel by British author Katie Davies is a flippy, fun and extremely fast-paced journey into the world of a very likable brother and sister—and their amusing family and friends. Intermittent silly pencil sketches fill the pages diary-style, creating a whimsical mood and adding comic relief.

Hilarious happenings, surreptitious outings, secret passwords and a lighthearted mystery liven up The Great Hamster Massacre. Giggles are frequent among the kids in this book, and they will infect readers as well.

Fans of the resilient and spirited young heroine in Katherine Hannigan’s 2004 debut Ida B will welcome the equally irrepressible and unforgettable Delaware “Delly” Pattison in Hannigan’s new novel, True (. . . sort of). With a tremendous sense of adventure and a fiery temper to boot, the fifth grader is tired of getting in trouble and not knowing why. She’s given one more chance to control herself or else she’ll be shipped off to reform school. Her younger brother, RB, suggests counting to cool her fire, but Delly tires of the nonstop numbers and gives up on finding the good inside herself.

All that changes when a new student arrives. Ferris Boyd may not talk or want to be touched, but she plays basketball better than anyone in her class and accepts Delly as she is. Though Delly is usually better at chasing people away than making friends, she begins to follow Ferris home from school every afternoon. She learns to pause and listen to what is said in a quiet way, instead of reacting without thinking. Knowing that she shouldn’t be unsupervised at Ferris’ house, Delly pretends to be working on an after-school project. Soon the whole world seems like a doughnut: “Sweet, beautiful, and delicious. And she was the floppy cream filling.” Then she notices the fear in Ferris when her father arrives early one day—and she realizes that sometimes the truth is just too awful to keep quiet.

This novel’s real truth is revealed in Hannigan’s poignant storytelling. Once again the author proves her ability to get inside her characters and bring out their strengths. Readers witness not only Delly’s tender transformation but her influence on other characters, such as Danny Novello, who only knows how to show his feelings for Delly by picking a fight. And her “liver and onions” relationship with her older sister, Galveston (“it was always bad, but it was part of being a Pattison”), even begins to sweeten. Especially endearing, though, is Delly’s unique lingo, which warrants her own dictionary, from Ferris’ secret tree house or “hideawayis” to her “bawlgrammit” nocuss words. Her story is perfexcellent!

The Luck of the Buttons is a marvelous romp through the town of Goodhue, Iowa, in 1929, led by a plucky heroine named Tugs Esther Button. The Button family has long been known for their bad luck, but Tugs is determined to break that losing streak.

This is a fun, exciting story that readers will tear through, written by award-winning author Anne Ylvisaker (pronounced ILL-vi-soccer). She explains the Buttons' lack of good fortune this way:

“While other parents sent their children off to school with a kiss and told them to do their best, the Buttons just said, ‘Don't get hit by the tater truck.’ Which would be nonsense to any other family, but Leonard Button, one of the Swisher Buttons, had indeed looked the wrong way when crossing Main Street some years ago. While he had survived, he hadn't eaten a potato, mashed or otherwise, since.”

Happily, Tugs' luck seems to be rapidly changing. A wealthy, kind girl named Aggie befriends her, and the girls win the July 4th three-legged race. What's more, Tugs wins an essay contest and also a raffle for a brand new Brownie camera. How's that for defying the tater truck?

Ylvisaker throws in a bit of intrigue in the form of a stranger named Harvey Moore, who claims he's going to revive the defunct local newspaper, the Goodhue Gazette. Tugs feels there's something sneaky about this smooth-talking fellow, and her natural curiosity leads her to unravel his conniving plan.

The Luck of the Buttons is a fast-paced novel about a slower, but endlessly fascinating era. Tugs may be "old fashioned," but she's got a modern sensibility, and through her own intelligence and determination, this young woman finds herself and turns her luck around.

Camping out with his mother over Labor Day weekend in Maine’s Acadia National Park is supposed to be the best three days of 11-year-old Jack Martel’s summer vacation. But when he awakes after their first night and discovers that his presumably bipolar mother has driven off and disappeared, Jack deduces that she must be “spinning.” Jennifer Richard Jacobson’s nuanced and heart-wrenching middle grade novel, Small as an Elephant, gives a quiet force to one resilient boy and his mentally ill mother.

Afraid that Social Services will take him away from his dysfunctional home (but his home nonetheless), his mother will go to jail, he’ll have to change schools and a host of other worries, Jack begins a 248-mile walk home to Massachusetts. Finding strength in his obsession with elephants, based on one of his first and strongest memories with his mother, he figures out how to forage for food, spend the night after hours at an LL Bean store and evade police when he learns that he’s the “Missing Boy” on the news. Hoping to make his long trek meaningful, Jack changes course, detouring to York’s Wild Kingdom to see Lydia, Maine’s only elephant.

Jack’s endless repertoire of elephant facts and stories, as well as the elephant information and quotes that begin each chapter, show that elephants and humans share many qualities. Both want to be accepted and loved. With a makeshift herd that helps him throughout his journey—supplying food, transportation, friendship and encouragement when he needs it—Jack accepts the truth about his mother and finds forgiveness and a new sense of home. Perhaps, like the elephants, it takes a herd to raise a child.