Book List for Young Adults and Middle Grades

Need something to inspire your child to read? Check out this book list...




1) "A Northern Light" by Jennifer Donnelly

Donnelly combines a mystery with a coming-of-age story about a girl choosing among family obligations, romance, and education. The mystery derives from a true event, the death in 1906 of a young woman in northern New York. In this fictional rendition, 16-year-old farm girl Mattie Gokey is working for the summer at the hotel where the murdered woman has been staying and has given Mattie letters to burn. As the details emerge about the possible murder, Mattie struggles with whether to burn the letters or turn them over to the police. She also wrestles with a deathbed promise to her mother to stay and raise her younger siblings. Mattie, who loves language and excels at creative writing, longs to go to New York City for college, encouraged by a feminist schoolteacher. The story’s structure reflects the two promises at issue, with chapters narrated in present tense set at the hotel during the summer and chapters in past tense set during the preceding year when her mother died. The chapters from the past take their headings from new words Mattie is learning from her dictionary, a device that grows a bit tedious, as do the myriad details about the farming life. Issues about racism and women’s rights are more deftly woven into the action. While tighter writing would have enhanced the work, this is nevertheless an absorbing story that will appeal strongly to the growing number of historical fiction fans. (Historical fiction. 12+)

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2) "The Scandalous Sisterhood of Pickerwillow Place" by Julie Berry

When an overbearing headmistress and her odious brother drop dead, seven Victorian schoolgirls decide to run their school without adult interference.

It’s an ordinary Sunday dinner at Saint Ethelreda’s School for Young Ladies until Mrs. Plackett and Mr. Aldous Godding choke on their veal and fall over, dead as a pair of unpleasant doornails. All of the seven students at Saint Ethelreda’s, from Dull Martha to Dour Elinor, are horrified at the notion of their inevitable separation. Once they tell the authorities about Mrs. Plackett’s death, surely they will all be sent back home to their dreadful families and shunted off to far worse schools. All seems lost until Smooth Kitty asks the others, what if they just don’t tell the authorities about their headmistress’s untimely demise? What follows is classic farce, as the young ladies spend the rest of that evening desperately hiding the corpses and their headmistress’s absence from an unprecedented stream of callers. Stout Alice is disguised as Mrs. Plackett, Disgraceful Mary Jane initiates the garden gravedigging, and Pocked Louise helpfully adopts a puppy. A third of the way through the novel, the breakneck shenanigans abruptly settle, becoming merely the backdrop of a fairly classic drawing-room mystery. The young ladies are charming and their problem-solving ingenious, though the epithets used to describe them—it is never “Roberta,” always “Dear Roberta”—get old very quickly.

Droll farce yields to intriguing mystery, leaving the seams between them showing. (Farce/mystery. 11-13)

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3) "The Case of the Missing Marquess" by Nancy Springer

With gleeful panache, Springer introduces an innocent but capable young sleuth—the younger sister of Mycroft and Sherlock Holmes, no less—and takes her from wild English countryside to the soupy filth of Victorian London. Having led a free-spirited but cloistered life on the ancestral country estate, 14-year-old Enola Holmes is thrown for a loop by her mother’s sudden disappearance—not to mention the subsequent arrival of her long-absent big brothers, both of whom turn out to be overbearing and dismissive of women. Rather than meekly knuckle under, though, Enola makes careful preparation (she thinks) and slips off to track her wayward parent down. On the way, she falls into the furor surrounding an apparent kidnapping (see title)—and then, barely does she arrive in the big city before some authentically scary ruffians snatch her, too. Naïve but a quick study, and more resourceful than even her renowned siblings, Enola resolutely surmounts each challenge that comes her way. By the end, she has rescued the spoiled young aristocrat, eluded her brothers, gotten a lead on her mother thanks to a series of cleverly coded messages and even set herself up as a “Perditorian”—a finder of lost things and people. A tasty appetizer, with every sign of further courses to come. (Fiction. 10-12)

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4) "The Ruby in the Smoke" by Phillip Pullman

Set in 19th-century London, an echo of Collins' Moonstone--an orphaned 16-year-old unravels the mystery of her heritage and tracks down a fabulous Indian ruby, which has left murder and mayhem in its wake. Sally Lockhart is a competent, self-reliant heroine. She walks out on the oppressive relative who's been housing her, gets her lawyer to rearrange her investments to raise her meager income by 20 percent, and finds a new home and job with an attractive, talented, but unbusinesslike young photographer and his sister, using her precocious business acumen to rescue their floundering finances. Meanwhile, trying to decipher messages from her father, recently lost at sea in the Far East, she encounters mysterious Mr. Marchbanks, who gives her a long document, which is stolen before she can read it, and also various unsavory denizens of the East End, including villainous Mrs. Holland, who has trapped Matthew Bedwell, messenger from Lock, hart, by his addiction to opium. A whiff of opium smoke induces a vivid repetition of Sally's recurring nightmare, convincing her that it is actually memory; later, she deliberately breathes opium fumes in order to retrieve further pieces of the puzzle. After kidnappings and escapes, several murders, the finding and losing of the ruby and finding of a more moderate but useful inheritance hidden by Lockhart, everything is sorted out with surprisingly few loose ends, given the plot's many threads. An entertaining yarn, enlivened by humor and vivid characters, with the added historical interest of early photography and the evils of the opium trade. Sure to please readers of historical romances.

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5) "Dead to Me" by Mary McCoy

A privileged girl turns detective in a gritty noir thriller about the not-so-glamorous side of Hollywood in the 1940s.

Alice Gates has always lived a comfortable life in her spacious Hollywood home. Her father does PR for a prestigious studio, and Alice and her sister, Annie, have spent their childhood hobnobbing with famous movie stars and attending glitzy parties. Suddenly, when Alice is 12, Annie leaves home with no explanation. Four years later, Alice receives a call that her sister is in the hospital, beaten and unconscious. As Alice tries to track down Annie’s assailant, she finds herself in the thick of a Tinseltown that isn’t quite so shiny, one full of runaways, pornographers, malicious gangsters, crooked cops and psychotic movie stars. As she begins to pick her way through the tangled web, she learns that the present-day events may ultimately lead back to the truth about her sister's leaving home all those years ago. McCoy's mystery unfolds slowly and cautiously, offering enough clues—and red herrings—to keep readers hooked. Its conclusion is tidily, perhaps a bit too conveniently, resolved, but against the richly envisioned backdrop of golden-age Hollywood's sinister underbelly, this minor quibble is easily forgiven.

Step aside, Nancy Drew; this dark mystery holds nothing back. (Historical mystery. 13 & up)

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6) "Long Lankin" by Lindsey Barraclough

A thoroughly terrifying, centuries-old monster stalks two children sent from London to stay with their great-aunt in the country.

Cora and little sister Mimi's Auntie Ida could hardly be less welcoming when they show up at her door, sent by their father while their Mum, always prone to "funny moods," is away—again. They must keep the windows and doors locked, even though the crumbling old house is steaming in the summer heat. They mustn't explore in the house, or go down to the marshes, or—especially—go down to the old church. Roger and his brother Pete, local boys, are also forbidden to go there, but when the four children fall in together, down to the church they go—and wake up Long Lankin. He likes them young. This atmospheric, pulse-pounding debut makes the most of its rural, post–World War II setting, a time and place where folklore uneasily informs reality. Barraclough controls her narrative with authority, shifting voices and tenses to provide both perspective and the occasional welcome respite from tension. The actual threat remains mostly unknown for almost the first half of the book, evident mostly in the long scratches by the door, the fetid stench of the church, the secretiveness of the villagers and, overwhelmingly, Auntie Ida's frank terror. If some of the historical exposition comes very conveniently, readers won't care—they will be too busy flipping the pages as Long Lankin closes in.

A good, old-fashioned literary horror tale for sophisticated readers. (Historical fantasy. 10-14)

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7) "Manor of Secrets" by Katherine Longshore

Upstairs, Lady Charlotte pines for a more adventurous, purposeful life, while downstairs, kitchen maid Janie doesn’t allow herself to consider any possibilities other than servitude.

The Manor is home to the Edmondses and all of the servants they require. Charlotte, age 16, understands that her mother, the icy Lady Diane wants her to marry dull Lord Andrew, but it’s a handsome footman who catches her eye and kisses her. She also forges a friendship with maid Janie, drawn to her adventurousness as well as her practical skills, though the admiration is not mutual. Alternating chapters reflect the two girls’ perspectives. The arrival of Charlotte’s cosmopolitan aunt, the Lady Beatrice, creates new questions in Charlotte’s mind about societal expectations and also about the mysterious coolness between Beatrice and Diane. References to corsets, airplanes, Worth gowns and “suffragettes” place the tale around 1910, as Old World values were beginning to shift. Longshore works in interesting details about period food and clothing, but characters’ speech and behavior often seem off, as, for instance, when servants riff on Shakespeare and the oh-so-proper Lady Diane refers to a “shiner.” The choppy prose style relies heavily on sentence fragments: “This was a test. Of her fortitude. But also of her ability to disregard the wall that separated mistress from servant.”

Pitched for Downton Abbey fans but lacking both the style and the accuracy. (Historical romance. 12-16)

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