By title

By author

Alison DeCamp

• Across the Nightingale Floor, Tales of the Otori, Book 1
• Lian Hearn

• Kind of a Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon fantasy set in an alternate Japan where people can have superpowers. It’s really well-done fantasy.

• Knucklehead
• Jon Scieszka

• A fantastic graphic novel about Jon’s boyhood in Flint, Michigan, where my husband is also from. It’s funny and real and mostly funny.

• Out from Boneville, Boneville Series, #1
• Jeff Smith

• These are so imaginative, innocent, and creative. I am a big fan of smart graphic novels and how they make us think.

• The Eddie Dickens Trilogy
• Philip Ardagh

• There’s a stuffed stoat in these books. I’m not even sure what that is, but do I really need to say more?

• The Willoughbys
• Lois Lowry

• Same Lois Lowry as THE GIVER, but a completely different kind of story, one where the kids are super smart and the adults need to get a clue.

• Winger
• Andrew Smith

• My 16 y.o. has read and reread this book about a 14 y.o. rugby player. It’s a story about all the confusion that’s part and parcel of growing up while simultaneously injecting humor and love and redemption into the entire mix.

• Nicholas
• Jean-Jacques Sempe

• Nicholas is irreverent and slightly naughty and a bit clueless but always funny.

• How They Croaked, The Awful Ends of the Awfully Famous
• Georgia Bragg

• (by Georgia Bragg & Kevin O’Malley)

  Just like the title says, this is a book about how famous people died. But really it’s a history book.

• We Were Liars
• E.Lockhart

• I read this book in three hours. Granted, I told my family I wasn’t feeling well so they actually left me alone for that amount of time, but I devoured this book. There’s an unreliable narrator and a shocking ending and a slew of open-ended questions that we still argue about in our house.

Jeff Zentner

• The First Time She Drowned
• Kerry Kletter

• "An absolutely gorgeous, lyrical, and unflinching story about a girl escaping from under the thumb of a toxic mother and living her own life."

• How to Hang a Witch
• Adriana Mather

• "A delightfully spooky, twist-turny, and gripping mystery set in a haunted present-day Salem, Massachusetts."

• The Love That Split the World
• Emily Henry

• "A beautiful and romantic time travel story set in small-town Kentucky."

• Kids of Appetite
• David Arnold

• (out in September) "A hilarious, quirky, and warm story about murder, first love, and families of choice."

• Everything, Everything
• Nicola Yoon

• "A sweet and swoony story about a girl who's allergic to the world."

• Simon vs. the Homo Sapiens Agenda
• Becky Albertalli

• "A hilarious, warm, and wise coming-out and coming-of-age story."

• More Happy Than Not
• Adam Silvera

• "A heartbreaking story about a young man running from his own memory."

Micol Ostow

• The Haunting of Hill House
• Shirley Jackson

• "The ne plus ultimate haunted house story, I like to think of Amity's Gwen as sort of a modern spin on Eleanor, a young woman seeing and experiencing ghostly things, whose mind and perceptions can't be trusted."

• We Have Always Lived in the Castle
• Shirley Jackson

• "A slow-burner filled with atmosphere. Merricat is the platonic ideal of an unreliable narrator."

• The Shining
• Stephen King

• "A suggestible man, prone to violence, isolated in a hotel that exerts evil force over his will... Jack Torrance is to Amity's Connor as Hill House's Eleanor is to Gwen."

• Tighter
• Adele Griffin

• "A modern take on The Turn of the Screw, Griffin draws from chilling source material and makes it her own for today's teen readers."

• To Die For
• Joyce Maynard

• "A dark and twisty thriller (the movie's great, too) that serves up multiple POV's on a platter. I spent a lot of time poring over the many distinct voices of that book."

• The Maddaddam trilogy
• Margaret Atwood

• "Epic and sprawling, boldly visionary, and still she manages to tie all of her narrative threads together by the series' conclusion. To spend ten minutes in that woman's head!"

• Dangerous Girls
• Abigail Haas

• "Pacing, pacing, pacing. Totally un-put-downable."

• The Amityville Horror
• Jay Anson

• "(That one probably goes without saying.)"

• We Were Liars
• E.Lockhart

• "The pages turn and the ending twists!"

Dan Gutman

• The Invention of Hugo Cabret

• Genius. The Sgt. Pepper of children's books.

• Hatchet

• Still the best survival story.

• Ball Four

• This is the book that turned me on to reading. For the first time, somebody wrote like they were having a conversation with me.

• Yertle the Turtle

• Or anything by Dr. Seuss. Can’t beat it.

• Mad Magazine

• Without it, all intelligent life on Earth would have ceased to exist.

Michael Buckley

• The Outsiders
• S.E. Hinton

• A timeless story of outcasts versus the privileged. Exciting and heartbreaking — Hinton should be applauded for understanding the mind of a guy so well.

• All Star Superman Books 1 and 2
• Frank Quitely

• Lex Luthor finally finds a way to kill Superman and the Big Blue Boy Scout prepares for his death with a shocking ending no one could have seen.

• Lord of the Flies
• William Golding

• A ship full of children from an all boys' school crashes on the beach of a deserted island. Unfortunately, it isn't long before the kids stop working together and break up into tribes with dark and deadly results.

• Pinocchio
• Carlo Collodi

• Most people have seen the movie but few have read the book and that’s a shame. Pinocchio is a walking nightmare and hilarious.

• The Graveyard Book
• Neil Gaiman

• An adaptation of the Jungle Book but instead of a boy being raised by wolves, he's reared by ghosts in an abandoned cemetery. It's chilling and dark, yet a powerful lesson on how a boy becomes a man.