Reading Level: Grades 7-9

16-year-old Prudence Galewski knows she should be grateful to be a scholarship student at Mrs. Browning's School for Girls but she finds her lessons in typing, literature and deportment oppressive. Prudence doesn't want to be a wife and mother or a secretary at a bank. She wants to know what causes diseases and how to prevent them even though girls in the early 19th century were not supposed to be interested in such unladylike things.

Reading Level: Grades 8-10

Kana Goldberg gains a deeper understanding of herself and others when she is sent to Japan to spend the summer with her mother's relatives after a bullied 8th grade classmate takes her own life.

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Other books by Holly thompson

Reading Level: Grades 5-8

Gidwitz chronicles Hansel and Gretel's adventures through some of the Grimm Brothers most blood-thirsty stories in this hilarious, terrifying fairy tale send-up.

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More books by Adam Gidwitz

Reading Level: Grades 8+

When Sophie is assigned to interview four new students for the "Welcome Back" issue of the school paper, her curiosity is piqued when Vlad rudely refuses to speak to her. Her concern intensifies when Vlad takes an obsessive interest in Sophie's half-sister. As Sophie's investigations continue, she finds herself treading a path of dangerous horror.

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Reading Level: Grades 7+

The year is 1984. Fifteen year old Maya packs a suitcase for a trip to India with her father. They are going to lay Maya's recently deceased Hindu mother to rest. Not long after they arrive, however, tumultuous religious differences between the Sikhs and Hindus explode into violence when prime minister Indira Gandhi is assassinated.

Reading Level: Grades 6-9

14-year-old Sherlock Holmes is thrust into a deadly adventure when he is sent to live with eccentric relatives during the school holidays

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More books by Andy Lane

Other engrossing Holmesian spin-offs include:

Reading Level: Grade 7-9

Reading Level: Grades 6-8

Reading Level: Grades 6-8

The Bartimeaus trilogy chronicled the demon's misadventures while under the control of an 11-year-old magician. In this prequel Stroud shares one of the djinni's earlier adventures as the very reluctant slave of the evil Khaba, an ambitions magician in the court of King Solomon who rules Jerusalem with the help of the powerful slave of the ring.

Reading Level: Grades 7-10

High school sophomore Mason has a fairly normal life, if you discount the ugly scar marring half of his hulky face; if you discount the disappearance of his father and his mother's drinking habit and tendency to require Mason to be her parent and not vice versa.