List

Cool Summer Reads 2025

By Skokie Staff Youth Services

Great fiction, graphic novels, and nonfiction for kids in grades 3-5.

  • Monster Locker

    2024 by Aguirre, Jorge Augusto

    Pablo Ortiz is an anxious sixth grader who had absolutely no idea his locker was a portal to the monster realm and no desire to be the hero called to defeat the Aztec goddess who has come through it. Good thing he has new friends schooled in fighting and an abuela who has the wisdom and weapons he needs to be successful.

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  • The Mystery of Locked Rooms

    2024 by Currie, Lindsay

    Three seventh-grade, puzzle-loving best friends set out to find a hidden treasure in an abandoned 1950's funhouse with mazes, puzzles, and secret codes.

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  • Max in the House of Spies

    2024 by Gidwitz, Adam

    Germany is becoming more and more dangerous for Jewish families, but Max is determined to find a way back home, and back to his parents. He has a plan to return to Berlin, but it involves accomplishing the impossible: becoming a British spy.

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  • How to Be a Color Wizard: Forage and Experiment with Natural Art Making

    2024 by Logan, Jason

    Using art, chemistry, and natural materials, this book will help you create your own inks and paints. The author offers clear, step-by-step instructions for fun projects using common ingredients, alongside safety tips and a whimsical personality quiz.

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  • The Secret Library

    2024 by Magoon, Kekla

    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.

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  • Magnolia Wu Unfolds It All

    2024 by Miller, Chanel

    Magnolia Wu, a 10-year-old sock detective, is determined to find every owner of each lonely, only, sock left behind in her parents' New York City laundromat, and she finds her first best friend along the way.

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  • Spying on Spies: How Elizebeth Smith Friedman Broke the Nazis' Secret Codes

    2024 by Moss, Marissa

    Elizebeth Smith Friedman, one of the founders of U.S. cryptology, became one of the world's greatest code breakers. She became first female codebreaker in the the Treasury Department and Coast Guard and created her own top-notch codebreaking unit, where she trained and led many male colleagues.

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  • The Wrong Way Home

    2024 by O'Shaughnessy, Kate

    When 12-year-old Fern and her mother abruptly leave their isolated, off-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.

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  • Will's Race for Home

    2025 by Rhodes, Jewell Parker

    During the land rush of 1889, African American Will and his father journey from Texas to Oklahoma, racing thousands of others to stake their claim.

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  • Lola Reyes Is So Not Worried

    2024 by Rodriguez, Cindy L.

    Lola Reyes doesn't want to leave Guatemala, where her abuela and prima and ̕tos and ̕tas surround her with love. Thinking she can bring a little bit of Guatemala back home with her, she decides to sneak a box of worry dolls, that once belonged to her dad, into her luggage, ignoring the warnings on the box not to use them.

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  • Kareem Between

    2024 by Safadi, Shifa Saltagi

    From failed football tryouts to helping the new Syrian refugee student, seventh-grader Kareem attempts to navigate the social complexities of seventh grade, which are further complicated when his mother is unable to return home from Syria due to an executive order.

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