Here are three fantasy books where kids uncover secrets and find that solving their personal problems might just help the larger world as well.
The Ink Witch by Steph Cherrywell. Little, Brown Books for Young Readers, 2025. ISBN 978-0316585941. Read ebook on Libby.
Becca has had a lot of fights with her mother about how boring she is, managing a run-down hotel in a dead-end town, and not even letting Becca do afterschool activities like theater. (Becca’s dad is out of the picture, since he thought he had a son and wants nothing to do with the daughter Becca knows she is.) Things get much more interesting than Becca expected when three magical things pop up: a troll named Oddvar living in the ice machine behind the hotel, an aunt she’d never heard of – Malatrice – who uses ink magic to curse her mother into a trance to get her to sign something – and her mother’s familiar, a tarantula named Natalya. It turns out that Becca is a witch, from a family of witches, and has just grown into her ability to see magical beings, even if she doesn’t yet have control over the magical ink in her that will let her cast spells.
However, as often as Becca got mad at her mother, having her in a zombie-like state where she only does exactly what she’s told is much, much worse. Natalya tells Becca that she can help her gather the ingredients to make a potion to reverse the spell. Doing so will require a lot of traveling – a harrowing journey by car, with Becca giving her mother step-by-step instructions for driving. Finding things like mermaid eggs and troll teeth involves learning more about the larger magical community and witches’ role in it, so that Becca is never able to be as wholly excited by her newfound abilities as she otherwise might be. I really appreciated how Becca being trans is handled here – it’s clearly had a big effect on her life, and she has some initial doubts at the beginning regarding puberty as the usual beginning of magical abilities. But no one on page ever questions that Becca is a girl, and the bulk of the story is just a charming and thoughtful adventure with an ending I didn’t see coming. This was a delight, and I’m so glad that the Stonewall Award Honor led me to find it.
Farrah Noorzad and the Realm of Nightmares by Deeba Zargarpur. Labyrinth Road, 2025. ISBN 9780593564455. Read from a library copy.
It’s been several months since Farrah, her half-brother Yaseen, and her half-jinn friend Idris saved the court of the jinn kings in Farrah Noorzad and the Ring of Fate. Farrah hasn’t heard from any of them since and misses her father and the jinn realm, so that when she gets a summons to the djinn realm, she eagerly accepts – only to find herself under arrest. This pits her “quick trip” against her promise to be there for her mother and to spend spring break with her best friend. But things are going wrong in the jinn kingdom once again. The only way to prove her innocence is to pose as a student at the jinn academy – which would be fun, if only she didn’t have to hide who she really is, and if trying to figure out what really is going wrong didn’t go so clearly against all the rules she’s supposed to be following. Plus, there’s a small matter of a prophecy she’s given – and then told not to resolve. This time, as the title suggests, the journey will Farrah and her team to the realm of the King of Nightmares. The adventure is clearly not over by the end of the book, and I am just a teensy bit nervous that book three hasn’t been announced yet.
Scarlet Morning by ND Stevenson. Quill Tree Books, 2025. ISBN 978-0063210349. Read from a library copy.
Like nearly everyone else, I adored Lumberjanes, Nimona, and the new She-Ra, so I was thrilled to see ND Stevenson’s first venture into a prose middle grade novel. Viola and Wilmur have lived on the desolate island of Caveat for as long as they can remember, surrounded by shipwrecks trapped by drifts and floes of salt as thick as ice. Once they had a caretaker and the hope that someday their parents might find them, but now they have neither. Their caretaker impressed two things on them before she vanished: beware of the pirate Scarlet Morning – who killed the beautiful Queen Hail Meridian – and never let anyone take great book filled with brass gears and dials that stays hidden under her bed. But with both Wilmur and Viola now in their teens and no sources of food on the island, when a ship captain named Cadence Chase bursts into their cabin in the middle of a salt storm looking for their book, they have to take their chance to escape. Even if the ship looks suspiciously like a pirate ship, when all the pirates were supposed to have been wiped out 15 years earlier.
The narrative splits and comes back together, changing perspectives between Viola and Wilmur, with snatches of scenes from the past and pages from the mysterious book. The world of Dickerson’s Sea – dying, drowning in salt, and barely navigable – is deep, but I never felt mired in backstory, especially as we know that our main characters don’t know what happened to make their current world barely liveable. While there is plenty of swashbuckling, running from unknown enemies, and fighting off of monsters, there’s also introspection as our characters figure out their place in the world, on top of major themes of young people forced to survive in a world that the adults who came before them left in shambles. All of this is enlivened by Stevenson’s grayscale comic-style illustrations every few pages, with both full-page pieces and smaller spot illustrations. I felt like I had to wait forever for this book to be available at my library, but now I have to wait for September for the next book, Evening Gray, to come out.
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