Recommended Reading: Peter Nimble and His Fantastic Eyes by Jonathan Auxier

Book Description:

Peter Nimble and His Fantastic Eyes is the utterly beguiling tale of a ten-year-old blind orphan who has been schooled in a life of thievery. One fateful afternoon, he steals a box from a mysterious traveling haberdasher—a box that contains three pairs of magical eyes. When he tries the first pair, he is instantly transported to a hidden island where he is presented with a special quest: to travel to the dangerous Vanished Kingdom and rescue a people in need. Along with his loyal sidekick—a knight who has been turned into an unfortunate combination of horse and cat—and the magic eyes, he embarks on an unforgettable, swashbuckling adventure to discover his true destiny.

Peter Nimble is an earlier work from the author of The Night Gardener, which we enthusiastically recommended at the beginning of the year. Peter Nimble isn't quite that good, but it's still a lot of fun. The Night Gardener is middle-grade horror, with more focused themes and more overall success as a story, while Peter Nimble is a fantasy that relies on quirky characters and worldbuilding.  

The tone is light and not-quite-realistic, hearkening back to some favorite middle-grade books like The Phantom Tollbooth, but the actual content is a little more mature with lots of character deaths and injuries. The narrator has a Lemony Snicket sort of style where not everything he says in his asides can be trusted, but the target age range for this book may not understand that -- the narrator talks about how apes can go months without drinking water and have a hump to store water in, for instance. An older child would know this is tongue-in-cheek, but a younger child who's used to those kinds of educational asides might just take it at face value. 

Either way, Peter Nimble is a fun read for middle graders. It's got wacky characters like the cat-horse-knight Sir Tode, and a huge talking dogfish named Frederick. It's got enough action and jokes to keep things moving, but is also complex enough for older kids who want more of a challenge!

Recommended Reading: Royal Street by Suzanne Johnson

Book Description:

As the junior wizard sentinel for New Orleans, Drusilla Jaco’s job involves a lot more potion-mixing and pixie-retrieval than sniffing out supernatural bad guys like rogue vampires and lethal were-creatures. DJ's boss and mentor, Gerald St. Simon, is the wizard tasked with protecting the city from anyone or anything that might slip over from the preternatural beyond. Then Hurricane Katrina hammers New Orleans’ fragile levees, unleashing more than just dangerous flood waters.

While winds howled and Lake Pontchartrain surged, the borders between the modern city and the Otherworld crumbled. Now, the undead and the restless are roaming the Big Easy, and a serial killer with ties to voodoo is murdering the soldiers sent to help the city recover. To make it worse, Gerry has gone missing, the wizards’ Elders have assigned a grenade-toting assassin as DJ’s new partner, and undead pirate Jean Lafitte wants to make her walk his plank. 

Local author Suzanne Johnson's "Sookie Stackhouse meets Harry Dresden" series is a perfect choice for urban fantasy fans. Johnson uses the New Orleans setting to great effect, and she's created a realistically complex fantasy world around it. The heroine is more scientifically-minded than most heroines, but she's still fun and sassy. The writing is a little choppy in this first book -- the mystery elements can be overly obvious, and the romantic subplots unwieldy. Still, it's a strong and atmospheric first book, and in the sequel (River Road), those problems are solved!

Recommended Reading: Anna Dressed in Blood by Kendare Blake

Book Description:

Cas Lowood has inherited an unusual vocation: He kills the dead.

So did his father before him, until he was gruesomely murdered by a ghost he sought to kill. Now, armed with his father's mysterious and deadly athame, Cas travels the country with his kitchen-witch mother and their spirit-sniffing cat. They follow legends and local lore, destroy the murderous dead, and keep pesky things like the future and friends at bay.

Searching for a ghost the locals call Anna Dressed in Blood, Cas expects the usual: track, hunt, kill. What he finds instead is a girl entangled in curses and rage, a ghost like he's never faced before. She still wears the dress she wore on the day of her brutal murder in 1958: once white, now stained red and dripping with blood. Since her death, Anna has killed any and every person who has dared to step into the deserted Victorian she used to call home. Yet she spares Cas's life...

This 2011 release is the perfect YA book for anyone who loves the show Supernatural. It's got the ghosts, the creepy houses, the young professional hunter... The plotting is excellent and really manages to fuse a ghost story with a full-length YA novel. Ghost stories are generally a short-story format with very basic characters, so that's no mean feat. The characters are compelling, and it's great to see a YA novel from a boy's point of view. There's some romance, but the focus is on the ghost story. 

The series is complete in two volumes, the sequel being the equally-excellent Girl of Nightmares!

Recommended Reading: Frostborn by Lou Anders

Book Description:

Meet Karn. He is destined to take over the family farm in Norrøngard. His only problem? He’d rather be playing the board game Thrones and Bones.

Enter Thianna. Half human, half frost giantess. She’s too tall to blend in with other humans but too short to be taken seriously as a giant.

When family intrigues force Karn and Thianna to flee into the wilderness, they have to keep their sense of humor and their wits about them. But survival can be challenging when you’re being chased by a 1,500-year-old dragon, Helltoppr the undead warrior and his undead minions, an evil uncle, wyverns, and an assortment of trolls and giants.

Frostborn is Lou Anders' debut novel, a fantasy for middle graders and young adults. Advantageously placed in a trend of interest in Norse mythology and ice -- Thor, the Loki craze, and Frozen, to name a few -- Frostborn is similar enough to those things to make a good recommendation, but it's not a knockoff. As with all the best books for kids, it’s full of substance. It’s well-written and well-plotted. It’s clear what’s happening and accessible for those who are just getting into longer books, but complex enough for teens to enjoy. It’s light and fun, but contains serious themes about acceptance, family, and loyalty (both when you should have it and when you shouldn’t). Written with both of Anders' children in mind, the book is explicitly for both boys and girls -- Karn and Thianna always get equal billing, and they’re always equally important!

Recommended Reading: Alif the Unseen by G. Willow Wilson

Book Description: 

In an unnamed Middle Eastern security state, a young Arab-Indian hacker shields his clients—dissidents, outlaws, Islamists, and other watched groups—from surveillance and tries to stay out of trouble. He goes by Alif—the first letter of the Arabic alphabet, and a convenient handle to hide behind. The aristocratic woman Alif loves has jilted him for a prince chosen by her parents, and his computer has just been breached by the State’s electronic security force, putting his clients and his own neck on the line. Then it turns out his lover’s new fiancé is the head of State security, and his henchmen come after Alif, driving him underground. When Alif discovers The Thousand and One Days, the secret book of the jinn, which both he and the Hand suspect may unleash a new level of information technology, the stakes are raised and Alif must struggle for life or death, aided by forces seen and unseen. With shades of Neal Stephenson, Neil Gaiman, Philip Pullman, and The Thousand and One Nights, Alif the Unseen is a tour de force debut—a sophisticated melting pot of ideas, philosophy, religion, technology and spirituality smuggled inside an irresistible page-turner.

Alif the Unseen is a brilliant debut novel published in 2012. The setting is engrossing, drawing on Middle Eastern lore and combining it with the world of modern computer hackers. That level of creativity makes for a satisfying story on many levels, with enough personal drama for literary fiction and enough magic for a fantasy novel. Aladdin's genie even makes a cameo! The characters are wonderfully varied -- petty, noble, cowardly, and one-of-a-kind -- and each person is fully realized. Wilson avoids stereotypes by including plenty of female characters and people from many different backgrounds, with many different levels of piety. You can find Alif the Unseen in the adult fiction section, but it would hold equal appeal in YA!

Recommended Reading: Green Rider

Green Rider is an admirable beginning to a fantasy series that Kristen Britain continues to write to this day. Karigan G’ladahon, the novel’s protagonist, provides the reader with a strong female lead, a rarity in fantasy literature, and journeys throughout the world of Sacoridia in unexpected ways. The plot is well thought out, and the prose is generally seamless in its description of events.

The novel falters in its description of certain battle scenes, leaving the reader wanting more, and its lack of a map of Sacoridia, hindering the reader’s immersion into the world.  Despite these detriments Green Rider remains an enjoyable read for all ages and is recommended from a longtime, heroic fantasy bibliophile.

Book Discription:

Karigan G'ladahon has fled from school following a fight which would surely lead to her expulsion. As she makes her way through the deep forest, a galloping horse pounds up to her, its rider impaled by two black-shafted arrows. With his dying breath, he tells her he is a Green Rider, one of the legendary magical messengers of the King, and makes Karigan swear to deliver their message he's carrying, giving her his green coat, with its symbolic broach of office. This promise given to a dying man changes Karigan's life forever. Pursued by unknown assassins, following a path only her horse seems to know, she unwittingly finds herself in a world of deadly danger and complex magic, compelled by forces she cannot understand.

Daniel Tackett

Young Adult Librarian