Best Books for 12 Year Olds

Hoot

Carl Hiaasen

A Newbery Honor book. Roy has just moved to Florida and is the new kid again. He sees a strange boy running barefoot past the school bus and follows him into a fight to save a colony of tiny owls from a pancake house construction site.

Why read it: It is funny, fast and a little wild, and it shows kids taking on grown-ups to protect something that cannot protect itself.

Fun fact: Burrowing owls are real. In Florida they live in holes in the ground, which is why a construction site can bury them.

The Wednesday Wars

Gary D. Schmidt

A Newbery Honor book. It is 1967. Every Wednesday afternoon, half of Holling's class leaves for religion classes and he is left alone with Mrs. Baker, who he is sure hates him. She makes him read Shakespeare. It turns out to be the best year of his life.

Why read it: It is laugh-out-loud funny and quietly moving, and it shows how a teacher can change a kid's year.

Bud, Not Buddy

Christopher Paul Curtis

Winner of the Newbery Medal. It is the Great Depression in Michigan. Bud is ten, an orphan, and carries a suitcase with flyers for a jazz band. He is sure the bandleader is the father he never met, so he sets out to find him.

Why read it: Bud is funny and tough, his rules for life are hilarious, and the book shows a hard time in history through a kid who refuses to give up.

Fun fact: Christopher Paul Curtis spent 13 years hanging car doors on an auto factory assembly line and wrote during his breaks.

The Parker Inheritance

Varian Johnson

Candice finds an old letter in her grandmother's attic in a small South Carolina town. It describes a puzzle that leads to a fortune, and the clues lead her and her neighbor Brandon into the town's history of injustice.

Why read it: It is a real puzzle mystery with codes and clues, and it teaches history that many kids never hear about.

Fun fact: Varian Johnson wrote it as a tribute to The Westing Game, the puzzle mystery he loved as a kid.

Chasing Vermeer

Blue Balliett

A famous painting by the artist Vermeer disappears on its way to Chicago. Two sixth graders, Petra and Calder, notice strange coincidences and start to solve the theft with puzzles, patterns and a set of pentomino blocks.

Why read it: It is a mystery for kids who like patterns, and it gets them thinking about art and coincidence.

Fun fact: The pictures in the book hide a secret message. Readers can decode it from clues in the illustrations.

The Hobbit

J. R. R. Tolkien

Bilbo Baggins likes his quiet hole in the ground and his second breakfast. Then a wizard and thirteen dwarves show up at his door and sweep him off on a quest to take back their treasure from a dragon named Smaug.

Why read it: It is the adventure that started modern fantasy, and Bilbo is a hero kids relate to: scared, and brave anyway.

Fun fact: Tolkien was grading exam papers when he found a blank page and wrote on it: "In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit." He did not yet know what a hobbit was.

The Giver

Lois Lowry

Winner of the Newbery Medal. Jonas lives in a perfect community with no pain, no fear and no choices. At twelve he is given his life's job: to hold all the memories the community has given up. He starts to see what everyone has lost.

Why read it: It is short but asks huge questions about freedom and feelings, and kids keep thinking about it long after the last page.

Fun fact: Lois Lowry got the idea while visiting her elderly father, who was losing his memory. She started wondering what it would mean to lose painful memories, and what else you would lose with them.

Inkheart

Cornelia Funke

Meggie's father can read characters out of books and into the real world. Years ago, reading aloud, he brought out a villain named Capricorn, and something from their world went into the book. Now Capricorn has come looking for him.

Why read it: It is a fantasy for kids who love books, full of real quotes from famous stories, and it makes reading aloud feel dangerous and magical.

Fun fact: Cornelia Funke based Meggie's father on the actor Brendan Fraser, and Brendan Fraser later played him in the movie.

Howl's Moving Castle

Diana Wynne Jones

Sophie is the eldest of three sisters, so she is sure nothing exciting will ever happen to her. Then a witch turns her into an old woman. She takes a job cleaning a wizard's walking castle and makes a deal with the fire demon who powers it.

Why read it: It is funny and full of tricks, and Sophie is a hero who stops waiting for her life to start. It was made into a famous animated film by Hayao Miyazaki.

Fun fact: A boy at a school Diana Wynne Jones visited asked her to write a book called The Moving Castle. She wrote down his idea and later wrote the book.

Nimona

ND Stevenson

Nimona is a shapeshifter who shows up at the lair of a famous villain and announces she is his new sidekick. As they cause trouble together, it turns out the heroes might not be the good guys.

Why read it: It is funny and surprising, and it flips the usual hero-villain story upside down. It was made into an animated movie in 2023.

Fun fact: Nimona started as a webcomic that ND Stevenson posted online while in art school. It became his senior project.

Mexikid

Pedro Martín

A Newbery Honor book. A true story. Pedro's big Mexican American family piles into a camper and drives to Mexico to bring their grandfather back to live with them. Pedro does not know him, and he is not sure he wants to.

Why read it: It is a funny road trip in a crowded camper, and it shows how a kid finds out where his family comes from.

Fun fact: Mexikid started as Pedro Martín's online comic about growing up in his family.

The Hunger Games

Suzanne Collins

In a future country, each district must send two kids every year to fight to the death on live TV. When her little sister is chosen, Katniss volunteers to take her place. The book has a lot of violence; many families wait until twelve or older.

Why read it: It is impossible to put down, and it gets kids thinking about power, fairness and what we watch for entertainment.

Fun fact: Suzanne Collins got the idea while flipping TV channels between a reality show and news coverage of a war, until the two started to blur.

Lockwood & Co.

Jonathan Stroud

Ghosts have taken over London at night, and only kids can sense them. Agencies of young ghost-hunters armed with iron and salt keep the city safe. Lucy joins the smallest, strangest agency of all, run by a boy named Lockwood.

Why read it: It is spooky, funny and full of banter, and each book is a ghost case with real danger.

Fun fact: Netflix made it into a TV series in 2023.

Fablehaven

Brandon Mull

Kendra and Seth spend the summer at their grandparents' estate and find out it is a secret preserve for magical creatures: fairies, demons, giants. There are rules for staying safe, and Seth cannot stop breaking them.

Why read it: It is a fast, scary fantasy where breaking one rule has big consequences, and the series grows into an epic.

Fun fact: As a kid, Brandon Mull pretended magical creatures lived in the big trees around his house. That game became Fablehaven.

Treasure Island

Robert Louis Stevenson

Young Jim Hawkins finds a pirate's treasure map and sails off to find it. The ship's friendly one-legged cook, Long John Silver, turns out to be the most dangerous pirate of all.

Why read it: It invented the pirate story as we know it: treasure maps, parrots, "X marks the spot." Reading it is like finding where all of it came from.

Fun fact: It started on a rainy holiday in Scotland, when Stevenson helped his twelve-year-old stepson draw and color a map of an island. Within days he had written the first chapters and read them aloud to the family.

The Outsiders

S. E. Hinton

Ponyboy is a Greaser, one of the poor kids in town, always at war with the rich kids called the Socs. One night a fight goes terribly wrong, and Ponyboy and his friend Johnny have to run. There is violence and death in it.

Why read it: It was written by a teenager about teenagers, and it is about loyalty, class and how both sides of a fight are people.

Fun fact: S. E. Hinton started writing it when she was fifteen. She used her initials so readers would not know the author was a girl.

The Diary of a Young Girl

Anne Frank

Anne is thirteen when her Jewish family goes into hiding from the Nazis in a secret apartment in Amsterdam. For two years she writes in her diary about her family, her fears, her crushes and her hopes. The ending is very sad, and kids may need to talk about it.

Why read it: Anne sounds like a real teenager, funny and moody, which makes history personal in a way no textbook can.

Fun fact: The diary was a present for her thirteenth birthday, a red and white checked autograph book. She named it Kitty and wrote to it like a friend.

It's Trevor Noah: Born a Crime

Trevor Noah

Adapted for young readers. Trevor grew up in South Africa under apartheid, the law that kept Black and white people apart. With a Black mother and a white father, he had to be hidden as a child. It is the story of growing up, getting into trouble and his fearless mother.

Why read it: It is very funny and very serious at the same time, and it shows what unfair laws do to real families.

Fun fact: The title is true: when Trevor Noah was born, it was against the law in South Africa for his parents to have a child together.

Refugee

Alan Gratz

Three kids in three different times are forced to flee: Josef from Nazi Germany in 1939, Isabel from Cuba in 1994, and Mahmoud from Syria in 2015. Their chapters take turns, and their stories connect at the end.

Why read it: It moves like a thriller, and it helps kids understand what it means to have to leave everything behind.

The Maze Runner

James Dashner

Thomas wakes up in an elevator with no memory except his name. He arrives in a clearing full of boys, surrounded by a giant maze that changes every night. Nobody who stays in the maze after dark survives.

Why read it: It is a pure page-turner full of mystery, and kids want to solve the maze along with Thomas.

Fun fact: Every publisher James Dashner first sent it to turned it down. He rewrote it, put it away and came back to it, and it was finally accepted about two years later. It became a movie in 2014.

Gregor the Overlander

Suzanne Collins

Gregor's baby sister falls through a grate in their New York apartment building's laundry room, and he jumps in after her. They land in the Underland, a dark world of giant talking rats, bats and cockroaches at war, where a prophecy says Gregor is a warrior.

Why read it: It is a gripping adventure by the author of The Hunger Games, with less violence and a lot of heart.

Fun fact: Suzanne Collins was thinking about Alice in Wonderland and realized that a kid in New York City is much more likely to fall down a manhole than a rabbit hole.

The War That Saved My Life

Kimberly Brubaker Bradley

A Newbery Honor book. Ada was born with a twisted foot, and her mother has kept her locked in their London apartment her whole life. When children are sent out of London to escape the bombing in World War II, Ada sneaks out with her brother and finally starts to live.

Why read it: It is about a girl learning she is worth loving, and readers cheer for every small step she takes, like learning to ride a pony.

Inside Out & Back Again

Thanhhà Lại

Winner of the National Book Award. Hà is ten when the Vietnam War reaches her city and her family escapes by ship. They end up in Alabama, where the kids tease her and nothing tastes right. The whole book is written in short poems, one year of her life.

Why read it: The short poems make it quick to read and easy to feel, and it shows what it is like to be new in a whole country.

Fun fact: It is based on the author's own life. She also fled Vietnam with her family in 1975, at age ten, and grew up in Alabama.

Stargirl

Jerry Spinelli

A new girl arrives at an Arizona high school. She wears long skirts, plays the ukulele and sings happy birthday to people in the cafeteria. At first everyone loves her for being different. Then they turn on her for the same reason.

Why read it: It is about the pressure to be like everyone else, and it makes readers ask whether they would stand by someone different.

Fun fact: Jerry Spinelli has said his wife, the author Eileen Spinelli, is the person most like Stargirl. He borrowed some of her real habits for the character.

Anne of Green Gables

L. M. Montgomery

An elderly brother and sister on Prince Edward Island ask for an orphan boy to help on their farm. By mistake, they get Anne, a red-haired girl who talks nonstop, imagines everything and gets into trouble every week.

Why read it: Anne is one of the funniest and most loved characters in books, and her mistakes are as memorable as her wins.

Fun fact: The idea came from a note L. M. Montgomery wrote down years earlier about a real couple who asked for an orphan boy and were sent a girl by mistake, and decided to keep her.