Halloween Books: Get into the Spirit with Books for Young Readers

It’s officially spooky season! Get into the Halloween spirit with our lists of bewitching tales for all ages. This week, check out our list of stories to share with the young ghouls in your life!

Early Graphic Novels

A Super Scary Narwhalloween: A Narwhal and Jelly Book #8
By Ben Clanton
76 Pages | Ages 6-9 | Hardcover
ISBN 9780735266742 | Tundra Books
In the hilarious eighth book of this blockbuster graphic novel series, Narwhal and Jelly celebrate the spookiest time of the year – Halloween – with a super twist! Dive into three new stories that are sure to fright and delight! Narwhal loves Halloween – it’s a great excuse to dress up in a spooky and silly costume, like a ghost, a mermaid, a banana or maybe even Marlow the Mustachioed Moose. It’s a skeleTON of fun! Jelly isn’t dressing up, though – he’s a little scared of this time of year, and would prefer to hunker down in a hidey-hole until Halloween is over. But when a scary sea monster makes an appearance and swallows Narwhal (gulp!), can Jelly, with the help of some super friends, pluck up the courage to save his best bud?

Super Family: Simon and Chester #3
By Cale Atkinson
96 Pages | Ages 6-9 | Paperback
ISBN 9781774880005 | Tundra Books
Welcome to the world of Simon and Chester, ghost and boy duo extraordinaire. Chester lives with his Grandma, his cat Mr. Pickles and Simon the ghost. Lately Chester has been feeling like he’s missing out when he sees other families out doing fun family things.  So when Chester gets the opportunity to join his friend Amie and her family on a trip to the water park, he is IN. Meanwhile, Simon is off to his yearly ghost conference, excited to finally have something to show off about (haunting his VERY OWN HOUSE, for example) to the cool ghosts. Maybe they’ll even accept him into their group! Will things go as planned? Well, let’s put it this way: both Simon and Chester are about to learn a thing or two about the old saying “The grass is always greener . . .” 

Chapter Books

Crimson Twill: Witch in the Country
By Kallie George
Illustrated by Brigitta Sif
80 Pages | Ages 7-9 | Hardcover
ISBN 9781536214642 | Candlewick
Crimson Twill’s new friends from New Wart City, Mauve and Wesley, are coming for a visit! But as soon as they arrive at Crimson’s house in Cackle County, things start to go wrong. At the rotten apple orchard, Crimson’s ripening spell goes horribly awry (what will they do with all that rotten applesauce?). Then, at the broom-straw field, Wesley cuts too much straw and starts to float away. And when the friends try to collect frogs’ breath for their spells (it makes everything wonderfully green and warty), Mauve gets a stinky faceful of it! What on earth is going on? The whole countryside feels like something big is about to happen, and Crimson wonders if it has something to do with Granny Twill and that giant cauldron of stew she made. Can Crimson get to the bottom of this bad-luck mystery? And, more importantly, will her city friends ever want to visit her again?

Evie and the Truth About Witches
By John Martz
64 Pages | Ages 5-9 | Hardcover
ISBN 9780735271005 | Tundra Books
Evie wants to be scared, and the usual scary stories just aren’t doing it for her anymore. When she stumbles across a different sort of book, The Truth about Witches, she hopes she’s found something thrilling . . . but she’s forbidden by a kindly shopkeeper from reading the last page out loud! Naturally, her curiosity gets the better of her, and upon reading the last page out loud – a real summoning spell – Evie is spirited off to a strange land of magic, weird creatures, feasts, and actual witches! They’re not as scary as they seem, until Evie asks to join their ranks . . . and only once she does is her quest for true scariness satisfied . . .

Spooky Sleuths #4: Fire in the Sky
By Natasha Deen
Illustrated by Lissy Marlin
112 Pages | Ages 7-9 | Paperback
ISBN 9780593488966 | Random House BFYR
There are mysterious explosions near the old abandoned houses in town. Is it science . . . or is it something strange and ghostly? Find out in the latest installment to the spooky chapter book series Spooky Sleuths. Asim’s friend Max is in danger! Asim is sure some sort of supernatural being – a witch, maybe? – is after Max. Rokshar, the levelheaded one of the group, thinks the woman is a scientist using kids for her experiments! Either way, Max is in trouble, and it’s up to Asim and Rokshar to keep him safe. But when they get close to finding answers, Asim and his friends are attacked by fireballs. Is science behind the flying fire? Or is it a witch from Guyanese folklore? Find out . . . if you dare!

The Skull
By Jon Klassen
112 Pages | Ages 6-9 | Hardcover
ISBN 9781536223378 | Candlewick
Jon Klassen’s signature wry humor takes a turn for the ghostly in this thrilling retelling of a traditional Tyrolean folktale. In a big abandoned house, on a barren hill, lives a skull. A brave girl named Otilla has escaped from terrible danger and run away, and when she finds herself lost in the dark forest, the lonely house beckons. Her host, the skull, is afraid of something too, something that comes every night. Can brave Otilla save them both? Steeped in shadows and threaded with subtle wit – with rich, monochromatic artwork and an illuminating author’s note – The Skull is as empowering as it is mysterious and foreboding.

Middle Grade

Don’t Want to Be Your Monster
By Deke Moulton
304 Pages | Ages 10-14 | Hardcover
ISBN 9781774880494 | Tundra Books
Adam and Victor are brothers who have the usual fights over the remote, which movie to watch and whether or not it’s morally acceptable to eat people. Well, not so much eat . . . just drink a little blood. They’re vampires, hiding in plain sight with their eclectic yet loving family. Ten-year-old Adam knows he has a better purpose in his life (well, immortal life) than just drinking blood, but fourteen-year-old Victor wants to accept his own self-image of vampirism. Everything changes when bodies start to appear all over town, and it becomes clear that a vampire hunter may be on the lookout for the family. Can Adam and Victor reconcile their differences and work together to stop the killer before it’s too late?

Double O Stephen and the Ghostly Realm
By Angela Ahn
320 Pages | Ages 9-12 | Paperback
ISBN 9780735268296 | Tundra Books
Stephen loves pirates. What he doesn’t love is his name: Stephen Oh-O’Driscoll. He believes when his Korean mother and Irish father gave him this name, that it was just one cruel setup for being teased. Giving things the proper name is important, which is why Stephen thinks that it’s time to update the definition of “pirate.” They’ve got a bad rep, and maybe they deserve some of it, but Stephen still likes a few pirate traditions, like bandannas and eyepatches – he’s just not that into stealing things from people. He has the perfect new word: piventurate. A sailor who passionately seeks adventure. That’s what he wants to be. When he gets suspended from school for doing proper piventurate-in-training things (using sticks to practice sword fighting), his mother doesn’t let him sit around doing nothing, instead she takes him to a museum. At the museum everything changes. Stephen finds himself in a strange new place, face-to-face with a real pirate. A pirate ghost. Captain Sapperton needs Stephen’s help to cross to the other side, and his former ghost crew are intent on making sure Stephen follows through, whatever it takes. Stephen is about to discover the true meaning of piventurate, and much to his surprise, his adventure will not only take him farther into the ghostly realm, but also closer to home, where long-held family secrets reveal surprising ties to the spirit world.

Escape to Witch City
By E. Latimer
312 Pages | Ages 10+ | Paperback
ISBN 9781101919330 | Tundra Books
Emmaline Black has a secret. She can hear the rhythm of heartbeats. Not just her own, but others’ too. It’s a rhythm she’s learned to control, and that can only mean one thing . . . Emma’s a witch. In a world where a sentence of witchcraft comes with dire consequences and all children who have reached the age of thirteen are tested to ensure they have no witch blood, Emma must attempt to stamp out her power before her own test comes. But the more she researches, the more she begins to suspect that her radically anti-witch aunt and mother are hiding something – the truth about their sister, her Aunt Lenore, who disappeared under mysterious circumstances years ago. The day of the test comes, and Emma’s results not only pair her up with strange new friends, but set her on a course to challenge everything she’s ever been taught about magic, and reveal long-buried family secrets. It seems witches may not have been so easy to banish after all. Secret cities, untapped powers, missing family members – Emma is about to discover a whole new world.

Ghostlight
By Kenneth Oppel
400 Pages | Ages 10+ | Paperback
ISBN 9780735272354 | Puffin Canada
The story of the tragic death of sixteen-year-old Rebecca Strand and her lighthouse keeper father is just an elaborate tale Gabe tells tourists for his summer job on the Toronto Island. Or so he thought. When his ghost tours awaken Rebecca’s spirit, Gabe is drawn into a world far darker than any ghost story he’s ever heard. Rebecca reveals that she and her father were connected to The Order, a secret society devoted to protecting the world from “the wakeful and wicked dead” – malevolent spirits like Viker, the ghost responsible for their deaths. But now the Order has disappeared and Viker is growing even stronger, and he’ll stop at nothing to wreak chaos and destruction on the living. Gabe and his friends – both living and dead – must find a way to stop Viker before they all become lost souls.

Seven Dead Pirates
By Linda Bailey
304 Pages | Ages 8-12 | Paperback
ISBN 9781770498167 | Tundra Books
Lewis Dearborn is a lonely, anxious, “terminally shy” boy of eleven when his great-grandfather passes away and leaves Lewis’s family with his decaying seaside mansion. Lewis is initially delighted with his new bedroom, a secluded tower in a remote part of the house. Then he discovers that it’s already occupied – by the ghosts of seven dead pirates. Worse, the ghosts expect him to help them re-take their ship, now restored and on display in a local museum, so they can make their way to Libertalia, a legendary pirate utopia. The only problem is that this motley crew hasn’t left the house in almost two hundred years and is terrified of going outside. As Lewis warily sets out to assist his new roommates – a raucous, unruly bunch who exhibit a strange delight in thrift-store fashions and a thirst for storybooks – he begins to open himself to the possibilities of friendship, passion and joie de vivre and finds the courage to speak up.

The Dollhouse: A Ghost Story
By Charis Cotter
360 Pages | Ages 9-12 | Paperback
ISBN 9780735269088 | Tundra Books
Alice’s world is falling apart. Her parents are getting a divorce, and they’ve cancelled their yearly cottage trip – the one thing that gets Alice through the school year. Instead, Alice and her mom are heading to some small town where Alice’s mom will be a live-in nurse to a rich elderly lady. The house is huge, imposing, and spooky, and everything inside is meticulously kept and perfect – not a fun place to spend the summer. Things start to get weird when Alice finds a dollhouse in the attic that’s an exact replica of the house she’s living in. Then she wakes up to find a girl asleep next to her in her bed – a girl who looks a lot like one of the dolls from the dollhouse . . . . When the dollhouse starts to change when Alice isn’t looking, she knows she has to solve the mystery. Who are the girls in the dollhouse? What happened to them? And what is their connection to the mean and mysterious woman who owns the house?

The Grave Thief
By Dee Hahn
344 Pages | Ages 9-12 | Hardcover
ISBN 9780735269439 | Puffin Canada 
Twelve-year-old Spade is a grave thief. With his father and brother, he digs up the recently deceased to steal jewels, the main form of trade in Wyndhail. Digging graves works for Spade – alone in the graveyard at night, no one notices his limp or calls him names. He’s headed for a lifetime of theft when his father comes up with the audacious plan to rob a grave in the Wyndhail castle cemetery. Spade and his brother get caught in a royal trap, and Spade must find the master of the Woegon: a deadly creature that is stalking the castle by night. Along the way, he meets Ember, the queen’s niece, and together they race to solve the mystery of the legendary Deepstones and their connection to the Woegon, the queen, a missing king and the mysterious pebble Spade finds in the Wyndhail cemetery. This is a fantastic story of friendship, bravery, grief and acceptance.

Tundra Telegram: Books That Put You in Your Element

Hello, and thanks for joining us at Tundra Telegram, the column where we dig into the burning topics floating in the ether and recommend some books to dive into and set your synapses ablaze.

This Friday (June 16), Disney and Pixar release the animated film Elemental in theatres, a movie set in a world inhabited by anthropomorphic versions of the four classical elements (fire, water, air, earth). The romantic story follows a fire element (Ember) and water (Wade), who meet and fall in love and attempt to make their relationship work, against the odds and their society’s preconceived notions.

People are excited to visit Element City and mix it up with the characters. Accordingly, we’re recommending three books for each classical element in each age category. So, no matter if you’re a down-to-earth reader or your flair is for air, we’ve got some elemental reads for you!

PICTURE BOOKS

Looking for books about air? We’ve got a few books that will have you on Cloud 9, starting with Elbert in the Air by Monica Wesolowska and Jerome Pumphrey, a picture book about a boy who begins to float shortly after birth. Shortly after he is born, Elbert floats up into the air, making life a little tricky for him and his mother. Everyone in town has some homespun advice for keeping her boy down on the ground, but Elbert’s mother knows her son is meant to float.

Elly MacKay‘s In the Clouds is another wonderful book for young skywatchers and cloud stans. A dreamy book that takes place mostly in the stratosphere, if features a bored and curious little girl whisked off by a friendly bird to an adventure in the sky, where she can contemplate questions about the sky: how do clouds float? Or carry the rain? Where do they go when they disappear?

For a picture book that speaks more to the power of air, there’s Jeremy Worried about the Wind by Pamela Butchart and Kate Hindley. Anxious Jeremy learns his worries are well-founded when it comes to the wind: on a very windy day, he’s literally blown right out of his shoes and up into the sky. What follows is a madcap adventure, powered by the element of air, that makes Jeremy realize the things he worries about could be incredible experiences in disguise.

Maybe you’re looking for books that take a plunge into water? Dip your toes into the subject with Benjamin Flouw‘s Constellation of the Deep, in which a daring fox dons scuba gear and embarks on an underwater quest for an elusive, bioluminescent plant that reportedly grows at the bottom of the ocean.

If you’re ready to fully dive into the element, The Aquanaut by Jill Heinerth and Jaime Kim is ideal. Written by an actual underwater explorer and photographer (who is in the Women Divers Hall of Fame!), this is an inspiring picture book that encourages readers to explore their world, build their self-esteem and imagine what they can do and become when they grow up. This a book about chasing your dreams, especially when those dreams involve immersing yourself in water.

And David A. Robertson and Maya McKibbin‘s The Song That Called Them Home is a fantastical adventure inspired by Cree legends, in which a canoe trip in the lake goes horribly wrong and, after being thrown overboard, Lauren’s little brother, James, is taken underwater by mischievous creatures called the Memekwesewak. Lauren must journey into the watery depths to retrieve him.

What about some picture books that are on fire?Any reader of Dragons Love Tacos, the hit picture book by Adam Rubin and Daniel Salmieri, knows that once spicy salsa – which dragons do not like – enters the picture, a conflagration is sure to follow. Accordingly, spicy salsa is one element that dragons do not want at their taco bar.

The flames in Logan S. Kline‘s Finding Fire are considerably less destructive. A prehistoric young boy hunts for fire to bring his family warmth, and will face multiple challenges and dangers – and maybe make one woolly friend – in his attempt to bring the fire home.

While the 2023 Caldecott winner Hot Dog by Doug Salati may not feature much in the way of actual fire, the book is hotter than a short order cook’s grill. Depicting one dog and his sweltering travails in a New York City heatwave, the book is enough to make any young readers sweat.

And for some picture books that are the salt of the earth: Two friends tunnel deep into the element in Sam and Dave Dig a Hole by Mac Barnett and Jon Klassen. Experience the joys of earth and soil as Sam and Dave endeavor to find something spectacular under the ground in this deadpan story.

Marianna Coppo‘s Petra, on the other hand, features a character who is made of earth herself. Petra is a little rock with an irresistibly flexible self-perception – no matter what her situation, she knows she belongs – that goes to show not even earth is set in stone.

And if you’re a young reader who wants to know what’s really going under the soil, there’s Under Your Feet … Soil, Sand and Everything Underground by Wenjia Tang, a book that excavates all the information you want about the materials under your feet and the miraculous creatures that live there.

CHAPTER BOOKS & MIDDLE GRADE

A fast-paced fantasy adventure that spotlights the magical powers of air, Momo Arashima Steals the Sword of the Wind by Misa Sugiura features a Momo, an ordinary twelve-year-old who discovers her mother is a banished Shinto goddess who used to protect a long-forgotten passageway to the land of the dead. Momo will have to unlock her divine powers and team up with her former best friend and talking fox to protect that passageway from evil spirits. Plus, there is a weapon made of wind, which is why it’s on the list here.

The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind (Young Readers Edition) by William Kamkwamba and Bryan Mealer is a book that similarly showcases the power of air (though in a less stabby way). Based on the true story of how a young inventor (and the book’s co-author) brought electricity to his Malawian village, the story demonstrates how a windmill of scrap metal could generate electricity to pump the water needed in the village – all thanks to air.

The comics anthology Flight Volume One, edited by Kazu Kibuishi and featuring work from Derek Kirk Kim, Dylan Meconis and Hope Larson, among others, shies away from the power of air to instead highlight its majesty and wonder. Featuring dozens of short stories that circle around the topic of flight, with kites, airships, birds and more, it’s all about what takes place up in the air.

Is there such a thing as too much water? Rafe, the protagonist of Water, Water by Cary Fagan and Jon McNaught, would certainly think so. In this surreal adventure, Rafe wakes up one morning to discover his bedroom is floating in a vast sea of water. Alone with only his dog by his side, Rafe adapts to this watery new world by fishing cans of food out of the water and keeping an eye on the waves.

A futuristic underwater adventure worthy of Jules Verne, Rick Riordan‘s Daughter of the Deep is set at an academy for the best marine scientists, naval warriors, navigators, and underwater explorers in the world. Freshman Ana Dakkar is on her class’s weekend trial at sea, when her class is attacked by a rival land school and the uneasy peace between land and sea is shattered forever.

A love letter to lake communities, Hello from Renn Lake by Michele Weber Hurwitz takes place in a Wisconsin town, where Annalise’s family has run lakeside cabins for generations. Annalise herself feels a real connection to the lake (and even speaks to it) – that is, until the lake becomes polluted by harmful algae. This is a book about water conservation, and – even better – there are sections written from the perspective of the lake itself!

Fire of the volcanic kind comes to play in Lei and the Fire Goddess by Malia Maunakea, a fantasy adventure based on Hawaiian legend and mythology. The book stars twelve-year-old Anna Leilani KamaÊ»ehu, who doesn’t think curses and magic are real until she accidentally insults Pele the fire goddess by destroying her lehua blossom on a return visit to Hawaii. (Whoops.)

No curses necessary, only poorly maintained ecosystems for fire disaster to strike in Iain Lawrence‘s Fire on Headless Mountain. Virgil and his older siblings are on a mission to scatter their mother’s ashes (another fire reference) at her favorite mountain lake when a forest fire breaks out. Separated from his brother and sister, Virgil must remember the lessons of his science teacher mother to survive the sudden inferno.

And tween detectives Asim and Rokshar have a few close encounters of the fiery kind in Spooky Sleuths: Fire in the Sky by Natasha Deen and Lissy Marlin. When their friend Max finds himself in danger, Asim and Rokshar are attacked by fireballs. Is science … or a witch from Guyanese folklore … behind the flying fire?

You can’t talk children’s books and earth without mentioning Louis Sachar’s modern classic Holes. At a boys’ detention center, Camp Green Lake, Stanley Yelnats and his fellow detainees spend all day, every day digging holes exactly five feet wide and five feet deep. Soon Stanley realizes this isn’t just a punishment – the warden is looking for something under the dry earth. But what?

Continuing the tradition of books about underground tunnels, The Lifters by Dave Eggers, tells the story of two kids who discover the ground beneath their feet is not made of solid earth and stone but has been hollowed into hundreds of tunnels and passageways, created by mysterious forces for enigmatic reasons.

Set in a post-apocalyptic underground city, The City of Ember by Jeanne DuPrau, is an under-earth adventure without parallel. A last refuge for the human race, Ember is teetering on the edge of doom, its lamps flickering and threatening to extinguish forever. Only young Lina and her friend Doon can figure out the clues to save this city under the soil.

YOUNG ADULT

The air is a battlefield in Stateless by Elizabeth Wein. Teen pilot Stella North enters an air race across Europe in 1937, billed as “Circuit of Nations Olympics of the Air.” When she sees a plane deliberately knocked out of the sky by a fellow pilot, she must unwind the baffling mystery in the tense pre-war climate of the time.

The skies are also the site of terror in Flight 171 by Amy Christine Parker, though for entirely different reasons. In this case, a four-hour flight takes a turn for the horrific when a supernatural creature highjacks the plane and gives the senior class ski trip a deadly ultimatum: sacrifice one of them to die before the flight ends, or the entire plane will crash. (And you thought flying Sunwing was unpleasant!)

Science fiction makes us think of space (where there famously is no air), but Brandon Sanderson‘s Skyward is a science-fiction epic about aerial dogfights on an alien world. Spensa, a teenager who is one of a group of shipwrecked humans living on a ruined world under constant attack from mysterious aliens called the Krell. Spensa is determined to become a pilot, one of the brave few who can protect her people from the Krell, but she has the reputation of her father – a pilot who deserted his team and was killed – to overcome.

When you’re talking YA and water, you know there will be piracy in the mix. And that’s the case with The Wicked Bargain by Gabe Cole Novoa, a Latinx pirate fantasy starring a transmasc nonbinary teen with a mission of revenge and revolution – as well as the power to manipulate fire and ice (which is technically water). Add in a bargain with the Devil, an arrogant and handsome pirate, and a gender-fluid demon with opaque motives and you’ve got yourself a thrill ride wetter and wilder than Pirates of the Caribbean.

Those We Drown by Amy Goldsmith (out June 27) is an ocean-drenched, atmospheric horror novel about a high school semester-at-sea program – or “Seamester” – that turns into a dread-filled voyage with disappearing classmates and strange creatures that haunt the students’ dreams. Imagine Breaker High rewritten by H. P. Lovecraft and you know this is a book that plunges into darker waters than usual.

And In the Serpent’s Wake by Rachel Hartman was – at one point – called Tess of the Sea, to note its aquatic bona fides. A follow-up to Tess of the Road, it sees Tess on a mission from the Queen to sail across the oceans to the bottom of the world and prevent a war, though she may take a few sea-faring diversions on the way there.

Fire meets thriller in Jennifer Lynn Alvarez‘s Lies Like Wildfire, a book that features five friends who accidentally spark an enormous and deadly wildfire and – as the title suggests – lie about doing so. But as the blaze roars through their town and towards Yosemite National Park, Hannah, who is the daughter of the sheriff, feels her friends begin to crack and finds herself going to extreme lengths to protect their secret.

Another novel set into motion by wildfires, Up in Flames by Hailey Alcaraz, finds a wealthy and entitled teen, Ruby Ortega, whose life is turned upside down by wildfires that devastate her California hometown (and her parents’ business). Ruby must rebuild her life with the help of unexpected allies – including a beguiling, dark-eyed boy (naturally) – and become an unexpected heroine to the many people displaced by the fire.

The fires may be wild in Burn Our Bodies Down by Rory Power, but they are anything but natural. After all, it’s a massive fire in a cornfield in her mother’s hometown from which Margot pulls a girl who looks exactly like her. And things only get stranger after those fires.

Earth is at the heart of Bridge of Clay by Markus Zusak, an epic, multi-layered story of five brothers who – with a dead mother and absent father – raise each other, which not only features a main character named Clay, but also has that Clay build a bridge (also out of clay … or at least some form of earth) at the request of their suddenly returned father.

The novel Dig by A. S. King is a strange fever dream of a story that looks at racism, patriarchy, colonialism, toxic masculinity, and the systems that keep them all going, but it does so through five estranged cousins whose grandparents created a fortune potato farming (!) – a fortune they will not pass along to their grandchildren. In addition to the earth the potatoes are buried in, soil metaphors abound, looking at the darkness that finds root under white suburban respectability, and how one generation might be able to dig a way out to the light.

Finally, in less metaphoric matters, The Wrath & the Dawn by Renée Ahdieh is the first of a fantasy series with plenty of sand. Set in a desert kingdom, this reimagining of 1001 Nights sees Khalid, the eighteen-year-old Caliph of Khorasan, take a new bride each night only to have her executed at sunrise. When sixteen-year-old Shahrzad volunteers to marry Khalid, she has a plan to stay alive and get revenge for her best friend. But she discovers that the murderous boy-king is not what he seems and there is more to the deaths of so many girls. Also, she may be falling in love? (Time for Plan B!)

Tundra Telegram: Books for a New Start

Hello, and thanks for joining us at Tundra Telegram, the column where we run through the issues streaming through readers’ minds, and suggest some books that will succeed in keeping you reading.

It’s a brand-new year, and what better way is there to start 2023 than with a new book series! Luckily for you readers, there were many books published in 2022 that have a sequel (or sequels!) coming this year. If you’re keen to hop into a new duology, trilogy, quadrilogy, or ongoing series, we have options for you for every category and genre.

So take a chance on something new and dive into a new saga. New year, new series!

PICTURE BOOKS

A curious cockroach first met readers this past year in Maggie Hutchings and Felicita Sala‘s Your Birthday Was the Best!, in which the friendly insect crashes a kid’s party with hilarious (and sometimes stomach-churning results). That cockroach will be back in 2023, joining his hapless human child friend to class in Your School Is the Best! and this time, he’s brought the whole family!

Speaking of school, Our Classroom Rules! by Kallie George and Jay Fleck brings back the good-natured forest creatures from 2022’s Our Playground Rules! to talk about kindness and community in the classroom – and how a few simple empathetic “rules” can make school a cool place for everyone to be.

CHAPTER BOOKS & MIDDLE GRADE

The year 2023 will be a big one for graphic novel series for the youngest readers. Maureen Fergus and Alexandra Bye‘s rollicking pet comedy series Weenie featuring Frank & Beans will chase 2022’s Mad about Meatloaf with more food fun in The Pancake Problem. Whereas in the first book, dachshund Weenie conscripted his cat and guinea pig friends (Frank and Beans) in his quixotic quest to obtain some meatloaf, this book sees the trio battling a malfunctioning machine that makes flapjacks.

Comic readers and 80’s nostalgia fans were delighted by the return of Jessica and Elizabeth Wakefield in graphic novel form last year with Sweet Valley Twins: Best Friends by Francine Pascal, Nicole Andelfinger,and Claudia Aguirre. They were a bit younger (now in middle-school), but dealing with those same school and sisterly concerns. In 2023’s Sweet Valley Twins: Teacher’s Pet, Elizabeth and Jessica take a page from Center Stage and find themselves competing for the leading role in their dance class.

Mason Dickerson‘s Housecat Trouble was a true joy for cat lovers in 2022, as it featured a house with three cats – Buster, Nova, and Chauncey – some invisible spirits (that explains a lot, if you know cats) and tons of feline hijinks. Housecat Trouble: Lost and Found has our trio of cat friends discover a lost cat who may or may not be … a ghost? Spooky (but still adorable)!

For more of the creepy stuff, readers have Spooky Sleuths, a series begun in 2022 by Natasha Deen and Lissy Marlin in which friends Asim and Rokshar investigate strange phenomena in their town, X-Files-style. Rokshar, ever the skeptic, believes the paranormal activity can be explained by science, but Asim is not so sure, given how closely the events match Guyanese ghost stories. In 2023, readers have two new adventures to look forward to: Spooky Sleuths: Don’t Go Near the Water! and Spooky Sleuths: Fire in the Sky.

In the same creep-tastic vein is Kiersten White‘s Sinister Summer series, in which the Sinister-Winterbottom siblings visit increasingly questionable summer vacation spots and end up solving a few mysteries along the way. This year will see the Sinister-Winterbottoms visiting an eerily normal summer camp where nothing is what it seems in Camp Creepy and far more bizarre science camp at the manor of Mr. Frank and Dr. Stein in Menacing Manor.

While the Sinister-Winterbottom siblings often encounter creepy circumstances, Travis NicholsThe Terribles are kids who are literal monsters: a vampire, alien, mummy, kaiju and more. Plus, they all live on an island called Creep’s Cove (which could be the title of a Sinister Summer book). 2022’s The Terribles: Welcome to Stubtoe Elementary introduced readers to the monster gang and included a slew of comics, charts, and fun activities. A Witch’s Last Resort, out later this year, introduces a new witch and chronicles a class election for next school overlord!

For the geeks, 2022 also had much to celebrate, including T.P. Jagger‘s new series Hide and Geek, in which the GEEKs (Gina, Edgar, Elena, and Kevin) – four nerdy lifelong friends – solve a cryptic puzzle left by a famous toymaker in an attempt to save their town. Spoiler alert: they succeed, but a blogger begins casting doubt on their puzzle-solving powers. So the GEEKs saddle up again to take on another tremendous treasure hunt in The Treasure Test.

If reading about a group of four kids sounds appealing, but video games are more your thing, Player vs. Player: Ultimate Gaming Showdown by M.K. England and Chris Danger (!) might be your bag. Four kid gamers (“The Weird Ones”) take on 63 other teams in an epic tournament of Affinity, a battle-royale-style game. This year, Player vs. Player: Attack of the Bots brings back the kid games, now gone pro and with their own streaming channel. Only one problem: one-fourth of their crew – Wheatley – has gone missing!

While the Mapmakers graphic novels by Cameron Chittock and Amanda Castillo might sound like a young reader’s intro to cartography, Mapmakers and the Lost Magic actually introduces fans to a group of magical protectors long thought lost, until Alidade finds a secret door that leads to Blue, a magical creature called a memri who may help her protect the Valley from the merciless Night Coats. 2023’s Mapmakers and the Enchanted Mountain has Alidade and her allies ready to restore magic to the rest of the world outside the Valley – starting with a hidden Mountain village.

YOUNG ADULT

Winnipeg politician and author Wab Kinew‘s The Floraverse began in 2022 with Walking in Two Worlds, where readers met Bugz, an Indigenous girl living on the Rez who happens to be a dominant player in a massive multiplayer online game called (what else?) the Floraverse. The Everlasting Road (which hit stores just this week!) follows Bugz’s adventures in the ‘Verse, as she builds a weapon and virtual friend Waawaate, who fills the hole left by the death of her brother – with, as you might expect, problematic results.

The Outlaws Scarlett and Browne by Jonathan Stroud introduced YA readers to an unforgettable duo of fugitives – one with the power to read minds, one with a way with weapons – running for their lives in a future England. The follow-up to the slam-bang, action-packed intro, The Notorious Scarlett and Browne, out later this year, brings the pair of renegades back. This time, they have to save their friends, who have been taken hostage, via a mission nothing short of impossible!

And The Night in Question by Kathleen Glasgow and Liz Lawson continues the adventures of Castle Cove’s mystery solving odd couple – Alice Ogilvie and Iris Adams – first seen in The Agathas. After cracking the case of Brooke Donovan’s death, the pair dig into a violent assault at their school dance which seems to be connected to the unsolved death at the same site of a film starlet decades prior.

Tundra Telegram: Books for Your To-Be-Dread Pile

Hello, and thanks for joining us at Tundra Telegram, the column where we look at the things currently haunting readers, and recommend some petrifying publications in which to bury themselves (figuratively speaking, of course).

My fellow creatures of the night know that Halloween is just around the corner: the time to embrace all things spooky and eerie. In many parts of the world, this is the first year in a while that the young and ghoulish are able to gather at costume parties or take in a scary movie at the theatre or even trick-or-treat door-to-door. So, we’re a little more hyped for Halloween than usual.

Luckily, we’ve been able to scare up scads of scary, blood-curdling books, from those from the youngest readers to YA that might make Stephen King blanche. Read on – if you dare!

PICTURE BOOKS

Ghosts – they’re a classic Halloween costume. All you need is a sheet and two eyeholes. They’re also a classic element of many a Halloween book, and that includes some picture books featuring entirely friendly ghosts. There are few friendlier ghosts than Cale Atkinson‘s Simon, who first rose to prominence with the picture book Sir Simon: Super Scarer. Simon is given his first house-haunting assignment, but it doesn’t go well because the kid who lives in the house, Chester, isn’t afraid and can think of nothing more fun than spending time with a real, undead ghost! And for the true horror fans, there are dozens of horror-movie Easter eggs throughout the book’s illustrations.

In other tales of failed ghosts, No Such Thing by Ella Bailey features a poltergeist who can’t seem to spook a clever, skeptical girl named Georgia. No matter what the ghost does, Georgia has an explanation! This picture book is a perfectly not-too-spooky blend of supernatural and STEM.

And Riel Nason and Byron Eggenschweiler‘s The Little Ghost Who Was a Quilt is a ghost who demonstrates that being different is great, even if it makes being a ghost a little harder than he’d like. The book also makes for a great homemade Halloween costume that’s a level-up from the traditional sheet.

Lest we forget Gustavo: The Shy Ghost by Flavia Z. Drago, about a ghost who would love to make some friends – if only he could work up the courage. Technically a Day of the Dead book (rather than a Halloween one) – but that’s just a couple days after Halloween – Gustavo is a sweet story about introverted ghosts and companionship.

If these ghosts sound pretty cool and you need a few tips on how to make a ghost friend of your own, you need to read How to Make Friends with a Ghost by Rebecca Green. It whimsically provides tips for ghost care so you’ll make a spectral friend for life, including how to read your ghost spooky stories, and what snacks ghosts prefer.

Not to be outshone by ghosts, witches are also a time-honored Halloween favorite, and the perfect place to start, book-wise, is Leila: The Perfect Witch, by Flavia Z. Drago. From the creator who brought us Gustavo comes this other spooky picture book, featuring a witch who excels at nearly everything she does: flying, conjuring, shape-shifting. There’s only one thing she can’t do: cook. She tries to learn from her witchy sisters, but instead learns the value of trying your best, even if it’ll never win you any awards.

Witches are usually associated with Halloween, but what about Christmas? That’s where The Legend of the Christmas Witch by Aubrey Plaza (April Ludgate herself), Dan Murphy, and Julie Iredale comes in. The Christmas Witch is Santa Claus’s misunderstood twin sister, separated from the big elf at a young age, in a picture book that rethinks everything we know about witches and the holidays!

If you want to get a sense of the kinds of things witches get up to outside of the major holidays, Little Witch Hazel by Phoebe Wahl is for you. In four stories (one for each season), a tiny witch gets into adventures in the forest, be they rescuing an orphaned egg, investigating the howls of a ghost (this story is the spookiest), or lazing on a summer’s day.

But then, there are many other monsters to consider at Halloween, as well. Best to start with the guidebook, Monsters 101 by Cale Atkinson (man, he loves Halloween). Professors Vampire, Blob and Werewolf, along with their trusty lab assistant – a zombie named Tina – reveal some ridiculous and fang-in-cheek monster facts about creepy favorites from swamp creatures to demons.

And if you like monsters, you’ll want to read the story of the woman who created one of the granddaddies (if not the entire genre of horror): Mary Who Wrote Frankenstein by Linda Bailey and Júlia Sardà. This is the picture book biography of the girl behind one of the greatest novels and monsters of all time: Mary Shelley, who wrote Frankenstein. The book is also a wonderful exploration of creativity and where stories come from, complete with spine-chilling and gothic illustrations.

CHAPTER BOOKS & MIDDLE GRADE

Once again, we start with ghosts, this time with beloved Canadian writing legend Kenneth Oppel giving us chills with Ghostlight. It’s a fun (though sometimes terrifying) horror story in which young Gabe’s summer job scaring tourists with ghost stories turns real when he accidentally summons the spirit of a dead girl – and must join forces with her to protect the world of the living. As a bonus, it’s partially based on a real ghost story about Toronto’s Gibraltar Point Lighthouse.

Like ghosts by the water? Well, Double O Stephen and the Ghostly Realm by Angela Ahn features ghost pirates. A kid who loves pirates, Stephen Oh-O’Driscoll, comes face-to-pale-face with the ghost of pirate Captain Sapperton, who needs his help to cross over to the titular ghostly realm.

Karma Moon: Ghosthunter by Melissa Savage looks at the intersection of the supernatural and the reality-television in the story of a girl whose father is a TV ghost-hunter! Karma stays in a haunted Colorado hotel and must face her own anxiety and help her dad’s flailing TV series in this spooky book that’s part Veronica Mars, part The Shining.

Ghosts and spooky dolls? Sign us up for The Dollhouse: A Ghost Story by Canadian master of the middle-grade macabre Charis Cotter. When Alice and her mom head to some small town where Alice’s mom has been hired as the new live-in nurse to a rich elderly lady, Alice finds a dollhouse in an attic that’s an exact replica of the house she’s in. Then she wakes up to find a girl who look a lot like one of the dolls from the dollhouse – let the creeping dread begin!

And Sir Simon returns – this time in comic form, with the Simon & Chester graphic novel series (again by Mr. Halloween, Cale Atkinson). In the three books that exist so far, the ghost and human friends solve mysteries (Super Detectives), stay up late (Super Sleepover), and visit the waterpark and a ghost conference (Super Family). Who says it’s all hauntings and eerie moans?

But we have witchcraft for early readers and middle-grade lovers, as well! Evie and the Truth about Witches by John Martz is about a girl who wants to be scared, and the usual horror stories aren’t doing it for her anymore (we’ve all been there). When she stumbles across a different sort of book, The Truth about Witches, she hopes she’s found a new scare, but she’s forbidden by a kindly shopkeeper from reading the last page out loud! Find out why in this graphic novel that is honestly quite unsettling!

Escape to Witch City by E. Latimer explores an alternate Victorian London where a sentence of witchcraft comes with dire consequences. Here, all children are tested at age thirteen to ensure they have no witch blood. So, Emmaline Black must attempt to stamp out her power before her own test comes. But the more she researches, the more she begins to suspect that her radically anti-witch aunt and mother are hiding something.

Speaking of witches and cities . . . readers so often encounter witches in the woods, standing over a bubbling cauldron. But what about urban witches? Crimson Twill: Witch in the City by Kallie George and Birgitta Sif features a little witch who loves bright colors as she ventures out on a big-city shopping adventure (think the Shopaholic series meets Bewitched). The book is also up for the Silver Birch Express Award, which makes us think there may be a few covens hidden amongst the Ontario Library Association.

And the city witches keep coming with Sophie Escabasse‘s Witches of Brooklyn graphic novel series. Life in Brooklyn takes a strange turn when Effie discovers magic runs in the family when she starts to live with her weird aunts – and weird in the Macbeth version of the term.

Ghosts and witches are fine, but what about the scary stuff out there. You know, the creepy things from outer space that Agents Fox Mulder and Dana Scully protected us from? Then you need The Area 51 Files from Julie Buxbaum and illustrator Lavanya Naidu. When Sky Patel-Baum is sent to live with her mysterious uncle, she didn’t imagine she’d end up at Area 51, a top-secret military base that just so happens to be full of aliens.

And Natasha Deen‘s Spooky Sleuths series, illustrated by Lissy Marlin, follows kids Asim and Rokshar as they uncover paranormal mysteries in their town. Whether it’s ghostly trees or teachers who glow in the moon or mermaids, the creepy supernatural encounters our heroes have are all based on ghost stories and folklore from Guyana!

Halloween in summer? It’s possible with New York Times bestselling author Kiersten White‘s Sinister Summer books. In each, the Sinister-Winterbottom twins solve mysteries at increasingly bizarre (and creepy) summer vacation spots. The books begin with an amusement park that’s seemingly cursed (Wretched Waterpark), then travel to a suspicious spa in the Transylvanian mountains (Vampiric Vacation).

And from the creator of Séance Tea Party (which is also a good Halloween read), Remeina Yee, comes the uncategorizable creatures of the graphic novel My Aunt Is a Monster. Safia thought that being blind meant she would only get to go on adventures through her audiobooks. This all changes when she goes to live with her distant and mysterious aunt, Lady Whimsy (who may be – okay, definitely is – a monster).

YOUNG ADULT

Now, do you want to be scared, or have a good horror-adjacent time? Because we have YA for both moods. In the realm of real scares is How to Survive your Murder by Danielle Valentine, that comes recommended by Mr. Goosebumps R. L. Stine himself! Kind of like a more murdery Back to the Future, the book concerns Alice, a teen about to testify in her sister Claire’s murder trial. But as she approaches the courtroom, she’s knocked out cold. When she awakes, it is Halloween night (see?) a year earlier, the same day Claire was murdered. Alice has until midnight to save her sister and find the real killer in this inventive slasher.

Speaking of slashers, let’s talk Stephanie Perkins and There’s Someone Inside Your House. The thriller works like a classic slasher, with students at Makani Young’s high school dropping like flies to a grotesque series of murders. Makani tries to sort out the rhyme and reason as the body count increases. Read it, then check out the Netflix adaptation (don’t watch this trailer unless you’re not easily spooked!) and see which you prefer.

And the slasher gets witchy with Coven by Jennifer Dugan and Kit Seaton, a queer, paranormal YA graphic novel featuring a young witch racing to solve a series grisly supernatural murders of her coven members in upstate New York before the killer strikes again.

Like your spooky stories with a healthy heaping of Cronenberg-esque body horror? You need to be reading Rory Power. Her debut novel Wilder Girls starred three best friends living in quarantine at their island boarding school where a disturbing infection, the Tox, has started seeping into everything – and everyone. She then followed that up with Burn Our Bodies Down a creepy yarn about weird and dark secrets in a teen girl’s mom’s hometown, for fans of Invasion of the Body Snatchers and people frightened by corn mazes.

The Taking of Jake Livingston by Ryan Douglass gives sixteen-year-old Jake Livingston the ability to see dead people everywhere. But for him, watching the last moments of dead people is easy compared to the racism he faces as one of the few Black students at St. Clair Prep. Just when a little romance enters his life, he encounters a dangerous ghost: Sawyer Doon, a troubled teen who shot and killed six kids at a local high school before taking his own life. Jake finds his supernatural abilities bring him into contact with some very dark forces.

If you like the trappings and style of horror, but a little less distress, we have YA novels for you, too. Case in point: Undead Girl Gang by Lily Anderson. In it, teenage Wiccan Mila Flores investigates the murders of three classmates (including one friend), but accidentally ends up bringing them back to life to form a hilariously unlikely – and mostly unwilling – vigilante girl gang. Sounds rad, right?

What We Harvest by Ann Fraistat isn’t all fun-and-games – in fact, it’s a folk horror about an idyllic small town being devoured by a mysterious blight called Quicksilver – but it certainly has some funny moments. And when Wren finds herself one of the last in her town unaffected by the blight, she turns to her ex, Derek, and the two have to uncover the weird and disturbing secrets that kept their town’s crops so plentiful.

Jessica Lewis‘s Bad Witch Burning is a witchy story full of Black girl (occult) magic. Katrell’s ability to summon the dead offers her a chance at a new life, as she figures it could help out at home, where her mother is unemployed and her dad avoids paying child support. So she doesn’t listen to the ghosts and takes her summoning a little too far, with very dark consequences.

Finally, The Babysitters Coven by Kate M. Williams is a funny, action-packed series about a coven of witchy babysitters who protect the innocent and save the world from evil. The series follows the indoctrination of seventeen-year-old babysitter Esme Pearl’s to this heroic lineage when she meets Cassandra Heaven, a force of nature who – for some reason – wants to join her babysitters club. And the sequel, For Better or Cursed, takes readers to the Summit of the Synod, the governing group of the Sitterhood – a sort of work conference for super-powered demon-fighting babysitters. Spells Like Teen Spirit wraps up the trilogy.

Tundra Book Group