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book recommendations for 10 year old boy?


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I tried searching the archives but you know how that goes...

 

My son loves to read. He prefers books about "real" kids, people, situations - he adored Wonder, for example, but disliked Percy Jackson and Harry Potter. Other recent hits include Pax and When I Reach You. He also does swift business in graphic novels, the I Survived series, and comics.

 

What are your favorite books for this age? I'm also drafting our literature list for the year, so feel free to add all sorts of hits. Thanks!

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Hm.

 

Try these:

 

Kinda Like Brothers

 

Flipped

 

Dash (and the other two books in that series, Dogs of WWII)

 

The War That Saved My Life

 

Pickle by Kim Baker

 

The Great Greene Heist

 

The Misadventures of the Family Fletcher

 

Mission Mumbai

 

The Boys Start the War

 

Swindle

 

Dragonwings

 

The Way Home Looks Now

 

As Brave as You

 

Bud, Not Buddy and also The Mighty Miss Malone (don't know how he feels about "girl" books)

 

Dave at Night

 

Save Me a Seat

 

One Crazy Summer

 

The Wednesday Wars

 

If I Ever Get Out of Here (geared very slightly older)

 

The Crossover

 

The Lightning Queen

 

Echo

 

Salt

 

All Rise for the Honorable Perry T. Cook

 

Ruby on the Outside

 

Al Capone Does My Shirts

 

City of Orphans

 

The King of Mulberry Street

 

Summer of the Gypsy Moths

 

Frindle (and any book by this author)

 

Hitler's Canary

 

Year of the Dog

 

Ticket to India

 

Brendan Buckley's Unvierse and Everything In It

 

The Birchbark House

 

Tracks by Diane Lee Wilson

 

The Wig in the Window

 

How Lamar's Bad Prank Earned Him a Bubba-Sized Trophy (again, geared slightly older, lots of talk about having a crush)

 

Bo at Ballard Creek

 

The Toothpaste Millionaire

 

The Thing About Luck

 

Ghost by Jason Reynolds

 

American Ace

 

The Harlem Charade

 

The Year of the Dog

 

Marco Impossible

 

The Lemonade War

 

Indian Shoes

 

How Tia Lola Came to Stay

 

The Long Pitch Home

 

Talking Leaves

 

Armstrong and Charlie

 

The Epic Fail of Arturo Zamora

 

The Detention Club

 

The Only Road

 

The Other Boy

 

Some of these books are light reads. Others are a little intense. Some are historical. Others are contemporary. You must do the sorting yourself, I'm afraid - but I can assure you they're all 100% realistic.

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Hatchet (does mention divorce in a way that you may want to preview to see if appropriate for your child)

My Side of the Mountain

Where the Red Fern Grows

Lost on a Mountain in Maine

 

My 9 year old has no interest in Percy Jackson or Harry Potter but he did really enjoy The Hobbit.

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My ten year old loved the Piet Prins books. The younger appropriate are about a dog around the time of the German occupation of the Netherlands during WWII. The older appropriate ones take place during the same time but go into the resistance movement more. FWIW, Piet Prins actually was part of the Dutch resistance and was in a concentration camp (one of the western ones) during part of WWII, so he wrote from true experience. That said, Prins is Dutch reformed, and though the books aren't preachy, I think, you might want to peruse one before handing it over to your kiddo. These were the series that took DS10 from slow reader to medium speed reader. He would read them aloud to me on car rides because he loved them so much.

Emily

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My boys also like "real kid" books more than fantasy overall.

 

Seconding some of these, like My Side of the Mountain (and if he likes that survival stuff, then Hatchet, obviously) and some of Tanaqui's great ideas, like The Lemonade War series, which is a nice, light read at this age but has a lot of good messages and little side academic stuff.

 

This is really the right age for Andrew Clements, and nearly all of his stuff is "everyday kid" genre and most are "boy books." We were especially fond of A Week in the Woods and Lunch Money, but he has a million.

 

Also an okay age to start in on Jerry Spinelli. Crash and Maniac McGee would be good ones.

 

If he'll do books with girls as the protagonist, then Wendy Mass is another great master of the "everyday kid" book. The birthdays series is good for this age (there's just a touch of magic in them). Or Jeremy Fink and the Meaning of Life and that one has a boy protagonist. She has many others though.

 

My boys really like the Winston Breen books - they also have puzzles. Also, the adored the I, Funny books, which are really, really easy reads.

 

For historical books, The Great Brain is a good "boy" everyday kid series. Tanaqui's list had some good ones in that vein, like Al Capone Does My Shirts and Bud, Not Buddy. And I'll add in that if he likes funny, Dead End in Norvelt is another great title in the everyday kid in history genre.

Edited by Farrar
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