Krakens, codes, and cliff-hangers: Six stories to delight young readers

Where may a child run freely – exploring without a screen blocking their view of the world or an overprotective parent shooing adventure safely away? In the pages of a book.

“Children have been underestimated for hundreds of years,” an old woman says in Katherine Rundell’s new fantasy, “Impossible Creatures.” “Why are you continuing the tedious tradition?”

None of these authors make that mistake. The six books demand a lot of both their young characters and their readers.

The possibility of change

Gayle Forman’s novel “Not Nothing” is an astonishing emotional feat that grabs a reader from the first page and leaves them in tears on the last. A 12-year-old is sentenced to work at an assisted living center after committing a hate crime. There, Alex meets Josey, a 107-year-old Holocaust survivor from Poland. The two strike up a friendship, with Josey telling him about the hero of his life, a girl named Olka who taught him to sew and saved his life. And Alex, whose mother disappeared over a year ago and who blames himself for the loss, finds someone who believes that “no one should be remembered for the worst thing they’ve done” when they’ve done so many better things. Forman delves deeply into “people’s capacity for cruelty, their capacity for kindness, and their capacity for change.” And, oh my goodness, does she stick the ending. The last line is a benediction.

“Not Nothing” is recommended by the publisher for age 10 and up.

Saving mythic critters

“Impossible Creatures” by Katherine Rundell – the first in a planned trilogy – was a runaway bestseller in Britain, racking up awards including Waterstones Book of the Year in 2023 and Author of the Year at the British Book Awards. And I defy anyone to come up with a better first line than, “It was a very fine day, until something tried to eat him.”

Christopher Forrester can’t go for a walk without squirrels approaching or crows bringing him paper clips – much to his overprotective father’s dismay. Then he runs to the top of a hill he’s not supposed to climb and finds a flying girl and a baby griffin. Mal Arvorian is on a race to save “the last magical place on earth,” an archipelago where unicorns and dragons the size of hummingbirds roam freely. It’s also home to krakens and talking green squirrels and sphinxes so old they have learned to hate riddles. But a grayness is taking over the land and emptying the seas. Rundell gets her characters in trouble on the first page and keeps them there. An older reader might like a beat to marvel at all the unnatural wonders, but there are mythic critters to be saved and the plot flies along, trying to keep up with Mal. “I can’t just stay indoors and sit on a chair all day,” she tells a character. “That’s how people turn to stone.”

“Impossible Creatures” is recommended by the publisher for age 10 and up.

A superfan disappears

What would you do if the magic world you dreamed of all your life turned out to be real? And you got to go there? And then it spat you out because you are not the Chosen One? You are, in fact, “remarkably unremarkable.” That’s the premise of Ransom Riggs’ “The Extraordinary Disappointments of Leopold Berry.” Following his mother’s death when he was 12, Leopold “Larry” Berry disappeared into old VHS tapes of “Max’s Adventures in Sunderworld,” a quirky cult show set in an alternate Los Angeles. Aside from being a Sunder superfan who writes his own episodes with his best friend, Larry spends his days keeping his mother’s old Volvo roadworthy and trying to avoid his father. His dad, the author of “Only Losers Don’t Win,” is a successful motivational speaker who very much enjoys being paid to yell at people, particularly his disappointment of a son. Then a mechanical raccoon lights its tail on fire outside a window, some skyscrapers start disappearing, and Larry is afraid he’s having dissociative episodes. Either that, or maybe Sunder – and its magic – are real. Riggs, author of “Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children,” creates a doozy of an opening salvo in his new series. I can almost forgive him for the cliff-hanger.

“The Extraordinary Disappointments of Leopold Berry” is recommended by the publisher for age 14 and up.

With a last name like Sherlock ...

Riddles, puzzles, and the lost treasure of Al Capone power “The Sherlock Society,” a charming ode to South Florida by James Ponti. When Zoe and Alex Sherlock decide to open a detective agency as a summer job (“Maybe if our last name was Baker, we would have sold cupcakes”), they recruit their grandfather as “director of transportation and logistics.” This means he drives them and their two friends around in his classic Cadillac. But really, the retired journalist teaches the four youngsters about the power of asking “who, what, where, when, why, and how.” In the book’s first set piece – an escape-room game set in a library – Ponti name-checks beloved child sleuths like Harriet M. Welsch (aka Harriet the Spy), Claudia Kincaid (“From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler”), and Leroy “Encyclopedia” Brown (who also hailed from Florida). But that’s just the jumping-off point for a story that offers a deep love of local history, literature, and the irreplaceable natural realm that is the Everglades.

“The Sherlock Society” is recommended by the publisher for ages 8 to 12.

Cracking the Enigma code

Puzzles of a far more deadly kind lie at the center of “The Bletchley Riddle” by Ruta Sepetys and Steve Sheinkin, in which a college-age code-breaker and his younger sister try to find their missing mother. It’s 1940, and Jakob Novis, a Cambridge mathematician, has been recruited to Bletchley Park to work on the Enigma project. His 14-year-old sister, Lizzie, is determined not to leave England until she finds out what happened to their mother, a U.S. Embassy clerk who went to Poland and never came back after the Nazis invaded. Jakob is sure their mum is dead and just wants to help stop the Germans who killed her. Lizzie, who is drafted as a messenger, is just as sure that he’s wrong and deeply hurt that he won’t help her. Then messages start arriving by mail, and an MI5 agent implies their mother was a traitor. Sepetys and Sheinkin deftly weave the desperate urgency of the days before the Blitz with the real history of geniuses like Alan Turing who bent their brilliance to stop Hitler. They also highlight the work of Polish code-breakers Marian Rejewski, Henryk Zygalski, and Jerzy Różycki. The history is enthralling, and the story of the people who cracked the Enigma machine is one very worth retelling.

“The Bletchley Riddle” is recommended by the publisher for age 10 and up.

A family divided by war

In “The Hotel Balzaar” by Kate DiCamillo, a young girl is waiting, “quiet, quiet like a mouse,” for her father, who’s been away at war. His last letter was a long time ago. Their home is gone, and her mother works as a chambermaid at the hotel, keeping her long black hair pinned under a cap. Mother and daughter live in a small room with a bed, a sink, and a battered chest of drawers. Aside from living in a hotel, Marta’s life is wholly unlike Eloise’s at The Plaza Hotel – there is no luxury, no Nanny. Just the imperative not to cause trouble. “I want you to know that war destroys everything, always. If anyone tries to explain it to you otherwise, in some other way, in words of nobility or valor, do not believe them,” Marta’s father wrote her in that last letter. Then one day, a countess checks in wearing a green parrot and promises to tell Marta seven stories. DiCamillo’s spare story and Júlia Sardà’s black-and-white drawings conjure the atmosphere of a fairy tale and the yearning of a family divided by war.

“The Hotel Balzaar” is recommended by the publisher for ages 7 to 10.