Most Read Children's Books Books

A dystopian survival story: Katniss Everdeen volunteers for a televised fight to the death to save her sister, then has to out-think both the arena and the Capitol's cameras to stay alive.

• survival
• reluctant hero
• love triangle
• sacrifice

Harry Potter, a scrawny boy with glasses and a lightning-bolt scar, has no idea he's a wizard — until a letter arrives. Dragged from his mundane life, he's whisked away to Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, where he discovers a world of magic, ancient secrets, and a mysterious stone that someone is trying to steal. Alongside his new friends Ron and Hermione, Harry must navigate the perils of the school and the mystery surrounding the Philosopher's Stone before it's too late.

• coming of age
• mentor figure
• quest

Before Harry Potter can even return to Hogwarts for his second year, a house-elf named Dobby appears in his bedroom with a frantic warning: do not go back to school. Harry ignores him — and arrives to find the castle under a shadow of genuine terror. Someone, or something, has begun attacking students, leaving them petrified and frozen with fear, and cryptic messages scrawled on the walls: the Chamber of Secrets has been opened. Enemies of the Heir, beware. As suspicion spreads and the attacks continue, Harry discovers he has an unsettling ability: he can hear a voice in the walls that no one else can detect, and he can speak to snakes in a language called Parseltongue — a gift that, in the Wizarding World, carries a disturbing reputation. Working with Hermione Granger and Ron Weasley, Harry follows the evidence into Hogwarts' hidden history, uncovering the story of a student who opened the Chamber fifty years earlier and the nature of the monster that has been sealed inside ever since. Darker in tone than its predecessor, the second Harry Potter novel deepens the mythology of the Wizarding World and introduces the concept of magical memory as a vessel for evil — a plot thread that will echo through all seven books.

Twelve-year-old Percy Jackson has bounced between boarding schools his whole life, dogged by ADHD, dyslexia, and a knack for trouble he cannot explain. When a museum field trip goes violently wrong, he learns the truth: he is a demigod, the son of the Greek sea god Poseidon, and the monsters of myth are very real. Whisked to Camp Half-Blood, a sanctuary for children of the gods on Long Island, he begins to understand a world hidden just behind the mortal one. But his arrival coincides with crisis. Zeus's master lightning bolt has been stolen, and the king of the gods blames Percy. With war among the Olympians looming, Percy is given ten days to find the real thief and return the bolt before the summer solstice. He sets out across the United States with two companions: Annabeth, a sharp daughter of Athena, and Grover, a satyr charged with his protection. Their road trip becomes a gauntlet of mythological dangers, leading at last to the Underworld and a confrontation that reveals a deeper conspiracy stirring beneath the squabbles of the gods. Narrated in Percy's wry, self-deprecating voice, the story blends fast adventure with a coming-of-age tale about belonging, absent fathers, and finding strength in the very traits that once made him an outsider.

• chosen one
• found family
• quest
• coming of age

Pip is a normal teenager, or so she thinks. But when her town's most notorious killer is found dead, she discovers a hidden connection to the crime. To clear her name and uncover the truth, Pip must navigate a dangerous path, uncovering dark secrets about her own family and the people she thought she knew. This is the first book in a thrilling mystery series.

Bilbo Baggins is a comfortable, respectable hobbit who wants nothing more than a quiet life in his hole at Bag End. That peace ends when the wizard Gandalf arrives with thirteen dwarves and recruits a reluctant Bilbo as the burglar for an expedition to the Lonely Mountain. There the dragon Smaug guards a vast treasure that once belonged to the dwarves, and their leader Thorin Oakenshield means to reclaim both the gold and his ancestral kingdom. The journey takes the company across a perilous landscape of trolls, goblins, giant spiders, and shape-shifters, testing a homebody who never expected adventure. Along the way Bilbo stumbles upon a magic ring and a strange creature named Gollum in the dark beneath the mountains, an encounter that will matter far beyond this tale. As the company nears its goal, Bilbo grows from timid passenger into the resourceful heart of the expedition, and the prospect of recovered treasure draws armies toward a single mountain. Written for younger readers but rich enough for any age, it is a tale of courage found in unlikely places, the pull of home, and the cost of greed, set in the world that would become Middle-earth.

• reluctant hero
• quest

Ketterdam is a bustling hub of international trade where anything can be had for the right price — and no one knows that better than Kaz Brekker, a young criminal prodigy who runs the streets of the Barrel with cold precision. When Kaz is offered a payout large enough to set him up for life, the catch is a heist no one has ever survived: break into the impregnable Ice Court in Fjerda and free a prisoner whose knowledge could tip the balance of world power. The job is impossible for any one person, so Kaz assembles a crew of six dangerous outcasts — a convict, a sharpshooter, a runaway, a spy, a Grisha Heartrender, and a demolitions expert — each with their own reasons for taking the risk and their own secrets to protect. Told through rotating points of view, the novel unfolds as an intricate caper thick with double-crosses and improvised gambles, gradually revealing the old wounds and hard-won loyalties that bind the crew together. Set in the same world as the Shadow and Bone trilogy but standing fully on its own, Six of Crows pairs a twisting heist plot with morally complicated characters who feel real in their damage and their wit. It launched the Six of Crows duology and became one of the defining fantasy series for young adult readers.

• heist
• found family
• morally grey
• multiple povs

Fifty years before Katniss Everdeen volunteers as tribute, sixteen-year-old Haymitch Abernathy is dragged from his home in District 12 to compete in the fiftieth Hunger Games — the second Quarter Quell, in which twice as many children are sent into the arena. Haymitch has no interest in the Capitol's spectacle and no illusions about his odds, but he has people he loves to protect and a defiant streak the Capitol is determined to break. Returning to Panem on the morning of Haymitch's reaping, Suzanne Collins reveals the brutal Games that forged the cynical, broken mentor readers first met in the original trilogy, and the true cost of surviving a system built on spectacle and control. This second Hunger Games prequel is a harrowing story of rebellion, propaganda, and the price of staying human.

• survival
• sacrifice
• coming of age
• morally grey

Avery Grambs is a pragmatic high-school senior with a plan for her future — one that has nothing to do with sudden wealth or handsome strangers. Then billionaire Tobias Hawthorne dies and leaves almost his entire fortune to Avery, a girl he never met. Overnight she goes from getting by to being worth billions, on one strange condition: she must move into Hawthorne House, the sprawling, secret-filled mansion where the tycoon's sharp, disinherited family still lives. The Hawthornes were raised on riddles, ciphers, and elaborate puzzle-hunts of their patriarch's design, and they are certain Avery's inheritance is the old man's final game. None of them know why she was chosen — least of all Avery. As she's drawn deeper into the mansion's hidden passages and coded clues, she finds herself caught between two very different Hawthorne grandsons, and realizes that solving the puzzle of her own inheritance may be the only way to stay alive. Twisty, addictive, and packed with clues, The Inheritance Games is the first book in Jennifer Lynn Barnes's bestselling YA mystery series.

• love triangle
• coming of age
• mystery box

Four evacuee siblings step through an old wardrobe into Narnia, a land of talking beasts held in endless winter by the White Witch. Guided by the great lion Aslan, they're drawn into a fight for Narnia's freedom that costs one of them a terrible betrayal — and Aslan an even greater price.

• portal fantasy
• sacrifice
• betrayal
• redemption arc

Seventeen-year-old Juliette has a lethal touch: skin-to-skin contact with another person causes them agonizing pain, and she has not touched anyone in 264 days. Branded a freak and consumed by guilt over an accident that killed a child, she has been locked away in an isolation cell of an asylum, recording her fractured thoughts in a journal. The world outside has collapsed under the rule of the Reestablishment, a regime promising order in a dying society while crushing freedom. Juliette's solitude breaks when a new cellmate arrives, Adam, a boy she recognizes from childhood. When soldiers come for her, she is delivered to Warner, a young, magnetic, and ruthless military commander who wants to weaponize her deadly ability for the regime. Forced to choose between becoming a tool of oppression and risking everything to escape, Juliette begins to discover she may not be as powerless or as alone as she believed. Told in an intensely interior, lyrical voice that uses crossed-out lines and repetition to render the narrator's unstable mind, the novel opens a dystopian saga about power, control, and self-worth. As alliances form and Juliette's understanding of her gift shifts, she edges toward the possibility that what she has feared as a curse might instead be a source of strength.

Seventeen-year-old Cassie Hobbes has a gift: she reads people. From the smallest details of dress, speech, and behaviour she can reconstruct who a person is and what they want — a talent shaped by the unsolved murder of her own mother. That ability draws the attention of a secret FBI program that recruits gifted teenagers as "Naturals": young people with exceptional, innate skills in profiling, lie detection, statistics, and emotion-reading, trained to work cold cases the Bureau can't crack. Living in a house with four other prodigies — including two very different boys who complicate her life in different ways — Cassie throws herself into the work. But when a killer begins staging murders that echo her mother's case, the exercise stops being academic. The killer knows the Naturals exist, and Cassie is the target. The first book in Jennifer Lynn Barnes's bestselling series pairs a fast, twisty serial-killer mystery with the emotional pull of found family and first romance. It is a young-adult thriller about the cost of understanding the darkest parts of human nature.

• found family
• coming of age

Greek and Roman demigods finally meet when the flying warship Argo II lands at Camp Jupiter, but the alliance is fragile. Seven heroes named in an ancient prophecy must sail to the lands of the old gods to stop Gaea from rising. Annabeth carries a separate, deadly burden: a solo quest passed down through daughters of Athena that no hero has survived. Book three of The Heroes of Olympus widens the adventure across the Mediterranean toward a cliffhanger on the edge of an abyss.

• quest
• found family
• multiple povs

Hazel and her friends must make a difficult choice between returning home with a crucial statue or continuing their dangerous quest. Meanwhile, Percy and Annabeth face extreme challenges in Tartarus, searching for a way to escape. The demigods race against time to prevent a catastrophic event and save their worlds.

• quest
• found family
• coming of age
• multiple povs

When a cholera epidemic in India leaves ten-year-old Mary Lennox orphaned, she is sent across the world to Misselthwaite Manor, the vast, half-shuttered Yorkshire estate of an uncle she has never met. Sour, spoiled, and unwanted, Mary arrives as a difficult child with no idea how to make a friend. Left largely to herself, she begins to explore the manor's grounds and hears rumours of a walled garden that has been locked and abandoned for ten years, ever since the death of her aunt. With the help of a friendly robin, a plainspoken housemaid named Martha, and Martha's animal-charming brother Dickon, Mary finds the hidden door and slowly coaxes the neglected garden back to life. In the night she also discovers a secret of the house itself: her cousin Colin, a sickly, tyrannical boy who has been kept in his room and told he will not live to grow up. As the garden greens and grows, so do the children. Fresh air, hard work, and friendship transform Mary from a disagreeable girl into a curious, generous one, and draw Colin out of his bed and his despair. Frances Hodgson Burnett's 1911 classic is a quiet, enduring story about healing, the restorative power of nature, and the way kindness can bring both a garden and a child back to life.

• found family

Shy, bullied Shannon Lynch transfers to Tommen College hiding bruises from her father — and is noticed by rugby prodigy Johnny Kavanagh. Book one of Chloe Walsh's Boys of Tommen: a 600-page slow-burn Irish sports romance about abuse, safety and found family.

• slow burn
• friends to lovers
• found family
• multiple povs

A talkative, imaginative orphan girl with a penchant for dramatic storytelling is sent by mistake to live with two elderly siblings who had hoped for a boy instead. Settling into life at Green Gables in the fictional town of Avonlea on Prince Edward Island, Anne Shirley navigates school, friendship, and her own growing sense of belonging while transforming the lives around her.

• found family
• fish out of water

Nine-year-old Bruno, son of a Nazi commandant, is uprooted from Berlin to a bleak house beside a place he calls "Out-With." Following a wire fence, he befriends Shmuel, a boy on the other side, never grasping what the fence means. John Boyne's spare, fable-like Holocaust novel told through a child's uncomprehending eyes.

A collection of five wizarding fairy tales first published for children in the early Middle Ages, presented here in a translation from the original runes by Hermione Granger, with commentary by Professor Albus Dumbledore. The stories — 'The Wizard and the Hopping Pot', 'The Fountain of Fair Fortune', 'The Warlock's Hairy Heart', 'Babbitty Rabbitty and her Cackling Stump', and 'The Tale of the Three Brothers' — are staples of wizarding childhood in the same way that Muggle children grow up with Cinderella and Sleeping Beauty. Dumbledore's scholarly footnotes contextualise the tales within wizarding history, noting where stories were bowdlerised by those who found their moral complexity uncomfortable, and adding biographical details about the author and the cultural disputes each tale has provoked. The collection was first published in 2008, but its origins were remarkable: Rowling hand-wrote and illustrated just seven copies, one of which was auctioned at Sotheby's in December 2007 for £1.95 million in aid of charity. 'The Tale of the Three Brothers' is central to the plot of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows — one of the stories that, read as a child, a character later recognises as containing a hidden truth about the world.

A collected edition of Lewis Carroll's two Alice novels: Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass. Alice falls down a rabbit hole into a world of shrinking potions, a grinning cat, and a tyrannical Queen of Hearts, then later climbs through a mirror into a chessboard world of talking twins and a knight who keeps falling off his horse.

• portal fantasy
• fish out of water

Wilbur is a runt piglet who would have been culled at birth if not for a young girl named Fern, who begs to keep him alive. Raised first by Fern and then sent to live in the Zuckermans' barn, Wilbur soon learns the hard truth of farm life: come winter, a spring pig is destined for the smokehouse. Lonely and frightened, he finds an unexpected friend in Charlotte A. Cavatica, a wise and eloquent grey spider who spins her web in the doorway above his pen. Determined to save Wilbur's life, Charlotte hatches an ingenious plan, weaving words into her web that turn an ordinary pig into the wonder of the county. Along the way, a cast of barnyard characters — the greedy rat Templeton, the anxious geese, the sheep — is drawn into the effort. E. B. White's beloved 1952 classic is a tender, quietly wise story about friendship, loyalty, and the natural cycle of life and death. Gentle enough for the youngest readers yet honest about loss, it has remained one of the most cherished children's novels ever written.

Charlie Bucket is a poor, kind-hearted boy who lives in a tiny house with his parents and four bedridden grandparents, gazing longingly at the enormous chocolate factory that dominates his town. The factory belongs to the eccentric, secretive genius Willy Wonka, who has not been seen in years — until he announces that five Golden Tickets have been hidden in Wonka Bars, and their finders will be given a tour of the factory and a lifetime supply of sweets. Against all odds, Charlie finds the last ticket. Alongside four spectacularly ill-behaved children, he steps into a wonderland of chocolate rivers, everlasting gobstoppers, and the mysterious Oompa-Loompas. One by one, the other children's greed and bad habits get the better of them, and it becomes clear that Wonka's tour is also a test. Roald Dahl's Charlie and the Chocolate Factory is a beloved modern classic — gleefully inventive, a little wicked, and warmly moral — that has enchanted children and adults for generations.

A young boy and his schoolmate discover a magical wood between worlds that connects countless parallel universes. Their accidental voyage leads them through time itself, where they witness the creation of Narnia by Aslan and inadvertently set in motion events that will shape its history for centuries to come.

• portal fantasy
• coming of age

Shel Silverstein's beloved 1974 collection of poems and drawings for children — over a hundred short, playful, and occasionally wistful poems paired with his signature line-drawn illustrations. From a boy who turns into a TV set to a girl who eats a whale, it's a whimsical, subversive romp through childhood imagination that has sold millions of copies since publication.

After his family is murdered one night, a toddler wanders out of his home and up the hill into an old graveyard, where the resident ghosts take him in and grant him the Freedom of the Graveyard. Named Nobody Owens — Bod for short — he is raised by a loving pair of ghostly parents and watched over by Silas, a mysterious guardian who is neither living nor dead and who can pass beyond the graveyard's walls to bring the boy food and knowledge. Growing up among the dead, Bod learns their uncanny skills — to Fade, to Dreamwalk, to slip through the boundary between worlds — while longing for the world of the living. But the man who killed his family is still out there, patiently searching for the child who got away, and the graveyard cannot shelter Bod forever. Neil Gaiman's Newbery- and Carnegie-winning The Graveyard Book is a spellbinding, gently macabre coming-of-age fantasy — a graveyard reimagining of The Jungle Book, full of wonder, danger, and heart.

• found family
• coming of age

Matilda Wormwood is a tiny girl with a colossal brain. By four she has taught herself to read, devoured the local library, and developed a keen sense of justice—none of which impresses her crooked, television-addled parents, who treat her as a nuisance. When Matilda is finally sent to school, she meets Miss Honey, a kind young teacher who recognizes her genius, and Miss Trunchbull, a monstrous headmistress who treats children as vermin to be flung, locked away, and terrorized. Armed with her wits, a taste for mischief, and a strange new power she is only beginning to understand, Matilda decides to fight back—on her own behalf and on Miss Honey's. What follows is a gleeful campaign against grown-up cruelty, waged by a small girl who refuses to be underestimated. One of Roald Dahl's best-loved novels, Matilda is a funny, big-hearted story about the power of books, cleverness, and standing up to bullies—no matter how enormous they are.

Olivia Prior has grown up at Merilance School for Independent Girls, an orphan who cannot speak and who has always seen things others cannot — the grey, half-decayed ghouls that drift at the edges of the world. All she has of her family is a journal her mother left behind, its later pages a frantic warning: Olivia, you must not go to Gallant. So when a letter arrives inviting her to Gallant, the crumbling country estate of the family she never knew, Olivia goes anyway. There she finds an unwelcoming cousin, a house full of secrets, and two unbreakable rules: never go out after dark, and never cross the ruined wall at the western edge of the grounds. Beyond that wall lies a shadow version of Gallant — a dead and colorless mirror-world ruled by a figure who has been waiting a very long time for a Prior to come home. V.E. Schwab's atmospheric gothic fantasy is a haunting, beautifully eerie story about family, belonging, and the thin door between the living world and the dark — anchored by a fierce, wordless heroine determined to hold that door shut.

• portal fantasy
• mystery box
• coming of age

Book one of Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events. After their parents die in a fire, the clever Baudelaire orphans — inventor Violet, bookish Klaus, and biting baby Sunny — are sent to the villainous Count Olaf, who will stop at nothing to steal their fortune. A darkly comic, mock-Gothic children's classic narrated in a droll, warning voice.