Boy reading book
Sand between your toes and sea spray on your nose – summer is a great time to cozy up with a good book on the beach! Whether you’re near the sea and sand or in your backyard with your imagination, check out these fun summer beach reads!
If you’re looking for:
Scary: Curl up and hold on for the night while orphaned Irish siblings Kip and Molly unravel the spooky ghost story of an old English manor in Jonathan Auxier’s The Night Gardener. Then follow best friends Zach, Poppy, and Alice as they unearth the secret of the haunted china doll known as the Queen in Holly Black’s Doll Bones.
Historical: Uncover the tragic history behind a ruined castle as two children trapped within work to repair it from the inside out in Merrie Haskell’s The Castle behind Thorns. Then follow brother and sister Seth and Abbie as they find work for a sea captain’s widow in seventeenth-century Wiscasset, Maine in Lea Wait’s Stopping to Home.
Silly: Laugh out loud along with bratty Lulu as she adventures into the woods on her own to try and find a pet brontosaurus in Lulu and the Brontosaurus. Or tag along with Jane during her wacky summer in Polly Horvath’s My One Hundred Adventures.
Friendship: Explore a North Carolina mountain valley in the 1920s with Arie Mae and her new friend Tom in our Mighty Girl Book Club book Anybody Shining by Frances O’Roark Dowell. Then follow Lily to her coastal Maine town as she befriends Salma, a Hispanic migrant worker, during the blueberry season in Cynthia Lord’s A Handful of Stars.
Mystery: Take on the case with the world’s most famous mystery-solvers in Irene Adler’s Sherlock, Lupin, and Me series. Or embark on a treasure hunt with Truly Lovejoy when she discovers an unsent letter in a first edition copy of Charlotte’s Web in Heather Vogel Frederick’s Absolutely Truly.
Fantasy: Jump into a world of fairytales with twins Alex and Connor when their grandmother gives them a magic book in The Wishing Spell, the first in The Land of Stories series by Chris Colfer and Brandon Dorman. Then sail along with Fin and Marrill as they embark on a swashbuckling adventure to recover the pieces of a magical map in Carrie Ryan and John Parke Davis’s The Map to Everywhere.
Graphic Novel: Discover the strange but friendly monster in the woods with Portia in Kean Soo’s Jellaby the Lost Monster, followed by Jellaby: Monster in the City. Or take a road trip with sisters Raina and Amara in Sisters by Raina Telgemeier, a companion to Smile.
Poetry: Follow Mina and her Japanese-American family as they’re forced from their Seattle home after the attack on Pearl Harbor in Mariko Nagai’s Dust of Eden. Then read what it was like growing up as an African American girl in the 1960s and 1970s in Jaqueline Woodson’s autobiographical Brown Girl Dreaming.
Nonfiction: Experience the true story of Malala Yousafzai, a Pakistani girl who was shot for standing up for girls’ education and survived in her autobiography I Am Malala, coauthored by Christina Lamb. Then step aboard the doomed Titanic and witness the disaster through the eyes of a boy’s toy bear in Polar the Titanic Bear, written by Daisy Corning Stone Spedden, an actual survivor of the shipwreck.
by Ashley B. Smith, Children’s Room Team
Little girl with a book on a tree branch
