By Clint Von Gundy
As the school year comes to a close, the viscerally upsetting reality has begun to set in that soon, parents will have some very bored children on their hands. Bored children complain. A lot. Sure, it’s all cook-outs, and water gun fights, and birdwatching, and trips to Hurricane Harbor (which is essentially just a very large public bathroom, if you ask me) up until July 4th. But as the temperatures climb to suffocation levels, and the dog days nip more aggressively at our heels, your kids will start running out of things to do, and you will begin to run out of patience, and possibly money. This serves no one.
Enter the summer reading list. No, not the one your child’s school assigns, and which your child deeply resents, but one curated by me, a noted eccentric with excellent taste in literature.
This isn’t a lame reading list; it’s a cool reading list.
The following books are ones that I returned to over and over, both as a kid and well into adulthood, and, while they tend to lean pretty heavily into horror, my genre of choice, there is a little bit of something for everybody.
I also don’t believe that novels are best judged by Lexile level. These are all relatively easy reads, but they are also thematically rich. A high-schooler can get quite a bit of enrichment out of a seemingly simple story if they know what to look for.
The Coven Tree Quadrilogy by Bill Brittain
(Devil’s Donkey, The Wishgiver, Dr. Dredd’s Wagon of Wonders, Professor Popkins Prodigious Polish)
A charming horror-adjacent series of easy reads that take place in a New England town that is vaguely Great Depression-coded, and also has its own Witch Trials lore. The heroes are both sly and steadfast, the villains are a Faustian coterie of mustache-twirling dark magicians, medical quacks selling snake oil and wolf tickets, and Harold Hill-esque carnival barker theater kids… and the pacing is gloriously fleet. My favorite in the series, Dr. Dredd’s Wagon of Wonders, is sadly out of print (so are Devil’s Donkey and Professor Popkin), but it’s easy enough to find secondhand. All of these volumes are beautifully illustrated, as well.
The Witch of Blackbird Pond by Elizabeth George Speare
Speaking of the Witch Trials, here’s a historical novel that lures you in with rich descriptions of early colonial life before tightening into something far more disturbing. The story of Kit Tyler’s arrival in rigid puritanical Connecticut doubles as a quiet indictment of fear-driven conformity. Written during the waning years of the McCarthy Era, it’s hard to miss the parallels between then, and then, and now (?) As suspicion escalates, individuality becomes a potentially deadly liability, and a community slides toward mass hysteria under the comforting illusion of enforceable righteousness. There are no monsters here, just the slow, procedural unraveling of trust and justice, which makes it land a great deal harder. Accessible, controlled, and thematically sharp, it asks a deceptively simple question: what does it actually cost to stand apart when everyone around you has decided that being even a little bit different is dangerous?
The Man Who Was Poe and True Confessions of Charlotte Doyle by Avi
The Man Who Was Poe is a tight, shadow-soaked mystery set in a grimy version of Baltimore (is there another version of Baltimore?) This novel pairs a frightened boy searching for his missing family with a strange, intense man who may or may not be Edgar Allan Poe himself (and, in any case, is a real weirdo). The plot moves quickly, but the real draw is the atmosphere, thick with dread, suspicion, and that unsettling sense that nothing is quite what it seems. It’s an ideal gateway into gothic fiction for young readers: accessible on the surface, but layered with darker themes about fear, identity, and storytelling that give it surprising depth for such a short read.
The True Confessions of Charlotte Doyle begins as the docile account of a proper young lady’s voyage across the sea, but it quickly devolves into a tense, high-stakes survival story aboard a 19th-century sailing ship captained by a maniac and teetering on the edge of mutiny, forcing Charlotte to confront danger, injustice, and her own rigid worldview. The novel excels as both a gripping adventure and a character study, charting her transformation from sheltered and rule-bound to fiercely independent and morally resolute. It is fast-paced and surprisingly sharp in its exploration of class, authority, and courage.
Weasel by Cynthia DeFelice
Like the historical fiction by Avi mentioned above, Westerns can be a hard sell for kids. This one has the advantage of being a suspense novel that just happens to be set in the middle of the frontier wilderness in the later years of the Indian Wars. The titular Weasel is not quite a serial killer, but he might as well be. He is an inscrutable and utterly malignant force of nature. This is a slim, brutal volume with breakneck plotting and the gumption to weave in elements of Lonesome Dove, The Searchers, and even Unforgiven and Blood Meridian. It’s a masterwork genre mash-up that makes for a compelling reading experience for the braver kids in your life.
Wait Till Helen Comes by Mary Downing Hahn
My mom read this book to my sister and me when I was very young, and it gave me nightmares (still does). As a young, only slightly dramatic child, I was very much convinced that Mary Downing Hahn deserved to be thrown in the clink. I have only ever experienced one other art-related trauma of this magnitude in my life: when Christopher Lloyd murdered the cartoon shoe in Who Framed Roger Rabbit? That said, this is a sophisticated ghost story that acknowledges that kids are smarter than we give them credit for, and that they are often more ready to tackle immense loss and grief than we adults sometimes believe.
The Chronicles of Prydain by Lloyd Alexander
(The Book of Three, The Black Cauldron, The Castle of Llyr, Taran Wanderer, The High King)
C.S. Lewis (For Narnia!), J.R.R. Tolkien (My precious!), Madeline L’Engle (Tesseracts!), and even Terry Brooks (The Sword of Shannara?) loom much larger in the world of classic children’s fantasy than my man, Lloyd Alexander. His work is now largely forgotten, but his clever, slender, big-hearted, and poignant reimagining of Welsh mythology, filtered through a generous and often very funny interpretation of the Hero’s Journey, demands reappraisal and a firm place in the canon. This is also true of T.A. Barron’s Young Merlin Cycle.
A Wizard of Earthsea by Ursula K. LeGuin
There is an excellent case to be made that Ursula Le Guin is the Great American Novelist. She is, at least, our finest writer of science fiction and fantasy. A Wizard of Earthsea is what Harry Potter wishes it was: emotionally resonant, economical, intelligent, and well-written. Le Guin was never interested in using high fantasy as a vehicle for mindless action or stories about how the real treasure was the friends we made along the way. Rather, in this case, it is a tool for examining how a young person might grapple with questions about power, wisdom, identity, and conflict that most adults can’t handle on their best days. This book is an elegant interrogation of fantasy tropes and it achieves, in its final pages, something pretty close to transcendence.
Watership Down by Richard Adams
When I read this massive volume in seventh grade, my friends and I disparagingly referred to it as “The Big Bunny Book.” It is a five-hundred-page parable about genocide, fascism, resilience, faith, and a lot of other things, besides, told through the perspective of sentient rabbits searching for a new home. It opens with a horrifying prophecy, runs our various leporine (which is a fancy word for “rabbit”) heroes through an existential meatgrinder, and ends on a quietly melancholy note that still sticks with me almost thirty years later. This book is a magnificent, devastating achievement, made-up rabbit language and all.
Something Wicked This Way Comes by Ray Bradbury
I had never read anybody who wrote like Ray Bradbury before somebody put this book in my hands. The man is a master of urgent, ecstatic prose. Yes, I’ve put this volume on a summer reading list, but Halloween will be just around the corner by the time school starts, and this novel simply lives and breathes by setting an intoxicating tone that I can only describe as Octoberish. This is a heartbreaking, exhilarating meditation on aging, loneliness and longing. It’s a magnum opus that takes the inner lives of children deadly seriously.
And Finally…
Hatchet by Gary Paulsen
Look, at some point or other, every one of us has lied to ourselves about how long we could realistically survive without the comforts of civilization. In reality, most of us would last maybe twenty minutes before ugly crying ourselves into a stupor and then sitting down criss-cross apple sauce in a wildflower meadow, resigned to our fate, never to be seen or heard from again. What I’m saying is… If your kids refuse to read over the summer, just drop them off somewhere in the deep woods with only a pocket knife and their wits to keep them alive for a few hours. I guarantee you they’ll be grateful for a trip to your local public library when you finally pick them up.
See you in August!
Gifted Education Family Network 