Great Books to Read in Summer and Beyond for 3rd-5th Graders

Poverty-stricken Joseph bravely rides out all the storms life keeps throwing at him.

Nothing about Kess Pedrock's life is normal. Not her home (she lives in her family's Unnatural History Museum), not her interests (hunting for megafauna fossils and skeletons), and not her best friend (a talking demon's head in a jar named Shrunken Jim). But things get even stranger than usual when Kess meets Lilou Starling, the new girl in town. Lilou comes to Kess for help breaking a mysterious curse--and the only clue she has leads straight into the center of Eelgrass Bog. Everyone knows the bog is full of witches, demons, and possibly worse, but Kess and Lilou are determined not to let that stop them. As they investigate the mystery and uncover long-buried secrets, Kess begins to realize that the curse might hit closer to home than she'd ever expected, and she'll have to summon all her courage to find a way to break it before it's too late.

Twelve-year-old Sahara prefers logic and science over magic, but when she travels to Cairo for a family wedding, her resistance to magic fades when she discovers that she is next in a line of women tasked with guarding Ali Baba's treasure.
 

A self-proclaimed sock detective inside her parents' New York City laundromat, 10-year-old Magnolia Wu and Iris, a new friend from California, set off across the city to solve the mystery of each missing sock, meeting people and uncovering the unimaginable along the way.

To find his way back home to his family in Germany during WWII, Max Bretzfeld, with a kobold named Berg on one shoulder and a dybbuk named Stein on the other, sets out to do the impossible--become a British spy.

Finding a mysterious letter from her late Grandpa, Dally is led straight to a library of secrets where each book is a portal to a precise moment in time, and she must find the courage to write her own life story as she "checks out" adventure after adventure.

A painting has been stolen...! When Rami sees a floating girl in the museum, he knows he has seen her somewhere before. Then he realizes: She looks just like the girl in the painting that has gone missing. But how does her appearance connect to the theft? Agatha the turtle knows--she has been watching from the garden. But she can't exactly tell anyone...can she? Will Rami, with the help of his classmate, Veda, be able to solve the mystery? The clues are all around them, but they'll have to be brave enough to really look.

When twelve-year-old Fern and her mother abruptly leave their isolated, off-the-grid community, Fern wants nothing more than to return, but things get murky as she slowly adjusts to her new life and discovers unsettling truths about her old one.
 

Packed with fun-filled illustrations, easy-to-follow exercises, and sample jokes, this humorous how-to joke book for kids proves that with a little elbow grease, anyone can write jokes that really make people LOL. Covering everything from surprise to wordplay to visual jokes--plus tips on how to perform a joke so it lands--LOL 101 is the approachable and (of course) funny guide for any kid ready to channel their inner comedian.

Do robots have emotions? What would happen if you jumped into a black hole? Can plants...hear things? Find the answers to these and even more far-flung questions in this quirky, super-stuffed curiosity quencher.