Summer Reading 2021: Magic, New Worlds, & Adventure

It's the most important rule of scuba diving: If you don't feel right, don't go down. So after her father falls ill, twelve-year-old Julie Sims must take over and lead two of his clients - a reckless boy Julie's age and his equally foolhardy father - on a dive miles off the coast of Alabama while her father stays behind in the boat. And once she surfaces, things only get worse: One of the clients is in serious condition, and their dive boat has vanished—along with Julie's father, the only person who knows their whereabouts. Though Julie may not like her clients, it's up to her to save them all.

Kaine, a cyberterrorist, has been holding players hostage in the VirtNet, a total mind/body virtual reality immersion. Michael and his friends, skilled gamers, are hired to to track him down. If he accepts their challenge, Michael will need to go off the VirtNet grid, to the back alleys and corners of the system human eyes have never seen--and it's possible that the line between game and reality will be blurred forever.

When Aero Horizon 16 crashes in the Arctic, eight children emerge from the wreckage to find themselves alone and surrounded, not by ice, but by a mysterious and deadly jungle full of carnivorous plants and predatory birds--the other five hundred people from the plane are gone, not necessarily dead, but taken by something that lives in the jungle.

Tom, a fourteen-year-old genius at virtual reality games, is recruited by the United States Military to begin training at the Pentagon Spire as a Combatant in World War III, controlling the mechanized drones that do the actual fighting off-planet.

Eli Frieden has never left Serenity, New Mexico...why would he ever want to? Then one day, he bikes to the edge of the city limits and something so crazy and unexpected happens, it changes everything. Eli convinces his friends to help him investigate further, and soon it becomes clear that nothing is as it seems in Serenity. The clues mount to reveal a shocking discovery, connecting their ideal crime-free community to some of the greatest criminal masterminds ever known. The kids realize they can trust no one--least of all their own parents.

After being separated from her sister and sold to a cruel goat farmer, Astri makes a daring escape. She quickly retrieves her little sister, and, armed with a troll treasure, a book of spells and curses, and a possibly magic hairbrush, they set off for America to find their father. With a mysterious companion in tow and the malevolent goatman in pursuit, the girls head over the Norwegian mountains, through field and forest, and in and out of folktales and dreams as they steadily make their way east of the sun and west of the moon.

Steeped in Hispanic folklore since childhood, middle schooler Charlie Hernández learns the stories are true when, shortly after his parents’ disappearance, he grows horns and feathers and finds himself at the heart of a battle to save the world.

Eva Evergreen is determined to earn the rank of Novice Witch before her 13th birthday or risk losing her magic forever, but when the biggest magical storm threatens the coastal town of Auteri, Eva hopes her limited powers will be enough to save the town and her dreams of becoming a witch.

After his mother left and his father became a recluse, Jeremy Johnson Johnson (whose mother and father both had the same last name) was left to support the family, but he's been aided by the ghost of Jacob Grimm, one half of the infamous Brothers Grimm writing duo, and when provocative local girl Ginger Boultinghouse takes an interest in Jeremy (and his unique abilities), a grim chain of events is put into motion.

Princess Anya has a big problem: Duke Rikard, her step-stepfather is an evil wizard who wants to rule the kingdom and has a habit of changing people into frogs, and her older sister Morven, the heir, is a wimp--so with the help of the librarian Gotfried (who turns into an owl when he is upset), and the Royal Dogs, she must find a way to defeat Rikard, save her sister, and maybe even turn Prince Denholm back into a human being.

Crossing paths at an inn, three 13th-century travelers impart the wryly whimsical tales of a monastery oblate, a Jewish refugee and a psychic peasant girl, who, in the company of a loyal greyhound, must escape evil knights, sit alongside a king and save their land from a flatulent dragon.

When Lily and her family move in with her sick grandmother, a magical tiger straight out of her halmoni's Korean folktales arrives. The tiger offers Lily a deal- if Lily will open her grandmother's star jars and return what she stole, the tiger will heal her grandmother. But deals with tigers are never what they seem! With the help of her sister and her new friend Ricky, Lily must find her voice . . . and the courage to face a tiger.

Twelve-year-old Sunny Nwazue, an American-born albino child of Nigerian parents, moves with her family back to Nigeria, where she learns that she has latent magical powers which she and three similarly gifted friends use to catch a serial killer.

Intent on revenge, Nathaniel, a young magician's apprentice, summons Bartimaeus, a five-thousand-year-old djinni, to steal the Amulet of Samarkand, a mysterious and enigmatic artifact, from ruthless master magician Simon Lovelace, and, along with Nathaniel, becomes caught up in a dangerous world of espionage, blackmail, murder, and conspiracy.

A stiff and snobby historian elf, Brangwain Spurge, is catapulted into the goblin kingdom as a spy and unknowing assassin, and is hosted by Werfel, a goblin archivist, who is anxious for cultural exchanges. Humorous mixed-media illustrations show Brangwain’s desperate letters back to the elf kingdom, while Werfel’s determinedly unbiased narrative tells an entirely different story.

Fourteen-year-old Madeleine of Cambridge, England, struggling to cope with poverty and her mother's illness, and fifteen-year-old Elliot of the Kingdom of Cello in a parallel world where colors are villainous, begin exchanging notes through a crack between their worlds and find they can be of great help to each other.

Twelve-year-old Carol is spending her summer in the New Mexico desert, helping her parents move her grandfather into a home for people with dementia. But as the summer wears on, Carol finds herself drawn to prickly Grandpa Serge, fascinated by the crazy stories he tells her about a healing tree, a green-glass lake, and the bees that will bring back the rain and end a hundred years of drought. As the line between magic and reality starts to blur, Carol must decide for herself what is possible -- and what it means to be true to her roots.

Eugenides, the queen’s thief, can steal anything or so he says. When his boasting lands him in prison and the king’s magus invites him on a quest to steal a legendary object, he’s in no position to refuse. Gen flaunts his ingenuity as a thief and relishes the adventure which takes him to a remote temple of the gods where he will attempt to steal a precious stone.