If you liked this, read that: newer book recommendations from our family
Homeschool moms are always swapping book recommendations, and I love a good book list as much as anyone. But sometimes my kids are just in love with a certain genre or flavor of book, and it’s helpful to find something else that scratches that itch. Most of the libraries we use don’t have the classics on the shelves anymore, so I tend to just buy all the classics and then do a lot of pre-reading of newer books to find ones that have the quality of writing I require and manage to avoid the kind of content I want to avoid. Reading level is always tricky, as my kids are voracious and advanced readers, and my kids hear a lot of read-alouds when they’re younger that they might not be able to read on their own quite yet. Roughly, I’d say these hit the 2nd-7th grade range for my kids.
If your kids love the Little House series, try…
Sweet Home Alaska by Carole Estby Dagg
Trip, the spunky protagonist of this sweet middle grade tale, is growing up during the Great Depression. When her family takes advantage of a government program that moves unemployed families to a new settlement in Alaska, Trip takes inspiration from her beloved Laura Ingalls Wilder books as she tries to embrace being a 20th century pioneer, keep her family together, and start a library for the kids of her new settlement. We read this aloud while studying the Great Depression in American history (it pairs well with Blue Willow, Roll of Thunder Hear My Cry, and Esperanza Rising), and all my kids, from the kindergartner to the middle schooler, found it delightful.
Little Britches: Father and I Were Ranchers by Ralph Moody
I heard the Little Britches series described as a boy’s Little House series. Though they are older, they’ve been reprinted recently, so you may be able to find them at the library or just buy them like I did. Like Laura Ingalls Wilder, Ralph Moody based these books on his own childhood as his family moved west to try to make it as ranchers in CO. For kids familiar with the challenges of Great Plains settlers from Little House, Sarah Plain and Tall, and other similar tales, it won’t be surprising that the Moodys faced many trials along the way. Subsequent books in the series follow Ralph and his family as tragedy befalls and they try to hold the family together. Work ethic and integrity are major themes, but they’re handled in a way that doesn’t seem preachy at all. When Ralph works with rough and tumble cowboys, there is some cowboy coarseness, but these are books written for children, and we enjoyed them on several cross-country car trips.
If your kids love The Phantom Tollbooth, try…
The Train to Impossible Places by P.G. Bell
Like Milo in the Phantom Tollbooth, Suzy is minding her own business at home, slightly bored, when she finds out about an alternate world that needs her help. Suddenly she’s on a magical train as a deputy postmaster, having adventures with fantastical creatures. My kids loved the celebration of reading and inventing and creating. When we read it, it was a standalone, and there was nothing objectionable for my grade schoolers. I haven’t read the rest of the series yet, so I can’t speak to content in future volumes.
If your kids love The Mysterious Benedict Society, try…
City Spies by James Ponti
My kids and I are suckers for groups of misfit kids bonded together for secret missions. Here, the kids in question are orphans brought together by MI6 to work as spies. The family dynamics are believable—it takes a while to mesh—and there are wise and caring adults overseeing things, but the kids get to use their ingenuity and special gifts to save the day. While there is spy-level danger (bad guys with guns, evil plots and schemes), it’s firmly middle-grade in content. My 10 year old just came down as I was typing this and sighed, “I’m halfway through City Spies, and I LOVE it!” (Side note: my 6th grader read the Spy School series this past year when all the girls in her homeschool group were passing them around. They were okay, but this series is much better!)
If your kids love Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry, try…
Stella by Starlight by Sharon Draper
When we studied modern American history, we did a deep dive into reading about segregation and the racial injustices that still impact our nation today. While Mildred Taylor’s Logan family books are deservedly classics, I loved how this newer book by Sharon Draper addresses the horrible realities of life for people of color in the South during the Depression while also celebrating the strong community, all in a way that is very accessible for middle grade readers. Stella is an engaging protagonist (and like my middle daughter, is an aspiring writer!), and I particularly was moved by a scene where the community bands together to feed and help a family whose home has been burned by the KKK because the father stood up for his right to vote. Important and well-written.
If your kids loved Chasing Vermeer, try…
The Book Scavenger by Jennifer Chambliss Bertman
Kids who love puzzles and books and scavenger hunts through major cities will enjoy following Emily and James as they follow clues to find new books and maybe defeat some dastardly bad guys, too. We’d just spent a few days in San Francisco for homeschool field trips when the kids read this book, so it was fun to see how many places we recognized. Content: this was a more mainstream middle grade release, so I just noticed a bit more mainstream name calling and “shut up” type language. Since we lived on a culdesac filled with public schooled tween boys at the time, it was tamer than my kids heard playing outside, and I had no problem handing it to my crew. For more details, here’s an extensive review of anything that might be objectionable to very careful families by a reader I follow on goodreads.
The Frame-Up by Wendy McLeod MacKnight
A Canadian art gallery where the characters in the paintings are alive? A dastardly plot that can only be foiled by those living art characters and their real-life summer youth arts camp friends? This story was totally my kids’ cup of tea. We’d read it a couple years ago and then listened to the audiobook on a family vacation, and everyone from the 8 year old to my husband and I were totally engaged. Sargent (a talented young artist) and Mona (the subject of a real painting at this real gallery) are charming and relatable, and their friends and relatives are well-developed. Sargent and his dad, the director of the gallery, are at odds because Sargent has mostly just been raised by his mom and step-dad back in the States until he comes for this summer visit, and his friends console him along the way that they don’t always feel understood by their parents, either. But my teen and I both felt very satisfied by the growth of the parent-child relationship.
