Here are 100 books that Nikki on the Line fans have personally recommended if you like
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Despite playing precisely one year of competitive basketball myself, as a gangly sixth grader in the 1990s forced to play without her (desperately needed) glasses and capable of only granny-style free throws, I fell in love with the sport later in life as a superfan of my local college basketball team, the University of Cincinnati Bearcats. I’m forever interested in players as human beings, and the way forces from their off-court life affect the game and vice versa.
Body image issues affect so many of us, and it can feel particularly acute in the middle school years, when our bodies are undergoing so much change. Though it’s been decades, I palpably remember how strange my growth spurt felt from the inside and how it changed my confidence.
In Alyson Gerber’s excellent book, Sarah is used to excelling on the basketball court, but when the shots stop falling, she’s quick to blame her changing physique and takes matters into her own hands to rectify things by drastically altering her eating habits.
Gerber handles this material with empathy and compassion, never talking down to the reader or getting preachy. Whatever your gender (body image issues are hardly limited to girls), there’s so much to relate to in this story.
From beloved author Alyson Gerber comes another realistic contemporary novel perfect for fans of Judy Blume.
Sarah loves basketball more than anything. Crushing it on the court makes her feel like she matters. And it's the only thing that helps her ignore how much it hurts when her mom forgets to feed her. But lately Sarah can't even play basketball right. She's slower now and missing shots she should be able to make. Her body doesn't feel like it's her own anymore. She's worried that changing herself back to how she used to be is the only way she can…
Twelve-year-old identical twins Ellie and Kat accidentally trigger their physicist mom’s unfinished time machine, launching themselves into a high-stakes adventure in 1970 Chicago. If they learn how to join forces and keep time travel out of the wrong hands, they might be able find a way home. Ellie’s gymnastics and…
Despite playing precisely one year of competitive basketball myself, as a gangly sixth grader in the 1990s forced to play without her (desperately needed) glasses and capable of only granny-style free throws, I fell in love with the sport later in life as a superfan of my local college basketball team, the University of Cincinnati Bearcats. I’m forever interested in players as human beings, and the way forces from their off-court life affect the game and vice versa.
Every baller has a player they absolutely idolize, whether it’s someone who makes the Sportscenter highlight reels on the regular or the best dunker at their local basketball court. For Shot Clock’s Tony, it’s Dante, who took his AAU team to the championships twice. But when Dante is killed by a police officer, everything changes.
This book brings you all the exciting game action you’d expect from a book with that title and cover, but it’s also a story about grief and loss (a sweet spot for me, always) and the intersection of racial justice and sports. I can’t wait for the sequel coming out in fall 2024.
Former NBA All-Star Caron Butler and acclaimed author Justin A. Reynolds tip off the first book in a new middle grade series about a young boy trying to make his mark on an AAU basketball team coached by a former NBA star in his hometown. Perfect for fans of The Crossover and the Track series. A Junior Library Guild Selection!
Tony loves basketball. But the game changed recently when his best friend, Dante, a hoops phenom, was killed by a police officer. Tony hopes he can carry on Dante’s legacy by making the Sabres, the AAU basketball team Dante took…
Despite playing precisely one year of competitive basketball myself, as a gangly sixth grader in the 1990s forced to play without her (desperately needed) glasses and capable of only granny-style free throws, I fell in love with the sport later in life as a superfan of my local college basketball team, the University of Cincinnati Bearcats. I’m forever interested in players as human beings, and the way forces from their off-court life affect the game and vice versa.
A graphic novel about girls’ basketball after the passing of Title IX? Sign me up!
This book takes readers into the early 1970s as Judy, Cindy, and Lisa join their school’s first-ever girls’ basketball team. Tavares is best known for his beautiful picture books, but here he crafts a completely winning story that’s as much about basketball as it is a slice of life in the seventies. Current middle schoolers will be blown away by the differences between then and now, both on and off the court.
I gobbled this book up in less than an hour, but I keep coming back to it again and again because there’s just that much to appreciate with the combination of the visual elements and the text.
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A work of fiction inspired by a true story, Matt Tavares’s debut graphic novel dramatizes the historic struggle for gender equality in high school sports.
It is 1975 in Indiana, and the Wilkins Regional High School girls’ basketball team is in their rookie season. Despite being undefeated, they practice at night in the elementary school and play to empty bleachers. Unlike the boys’ team, the Lady Bears have no buses to deliver them to away games and no uniforms, much less a laundry service. They make their own uniforms out of T-shirts and electrical…
Twelve-year-old identical twins Ellie and Kat accidentally trigger their physicist mom’s unfinished time machine, launching themselves into a high-stakes adventure in 1970 Chicago. If they learn how to join forces and keep time travel out of the wrong hands, they might be able find a way home. Ellie’s gymnastics and…
Despite playing precisely one year of competitive basketball myself, as a gangly sixth grader in the 1990s forced to play without her (desperately needed) glasses and capable of only granny-style free throws, I fell in love with the sport later in life as a superfan of my local college basketball team, the University of Cincinnati Bearcats. I’m forever interested in players as human beings, and the way forces from their off-court life affect the game and vice versa.
I’m mixing it up here a little with a non-fiction title that I think a lot of middle school fans of the game of basketball would learn a TON from. Maraniss, the award-winning and best-selling author of Strong Inside, brings an incredible amount of research and detail to life in this story of the first Olympic women’s basketball team.
My mind was truly blown reading about how much the earliest women’s basketball players had to overcome to compete, from the paternalist physicians who couldn’t have known less about a woman’s athletic capacity if they tried to practical, financial considerations and beyond.
These women are my heroes, and I’m grateful to Maraniss for honoring their legacies with this book.
From the New York Times bestselling author of Strong Inside comes the inspirational true story of the birth of women’s Olympic basketball at the 1976 Summer Games and the ragtag team that put US women’s basketball on the map. Perfect for fans of Steve Sheinkin and Daniel James Brown.
A League of Their Own meets Miracle in the inspirational true story of the first US Women’s Olympic Basketball team and their unlikely rise to the top.
Twenty years before women’s soccer became an Olympic sport and two decades before the formation of the WNBA, the ’76 US women’s basketball team…
I am a non-binary author and artist who, like so many of the characters in the books I have recommended, struggled with navigating their sexual identity while growing up. I believe this is an incredibly common experience amongst youth that deserves to be represented more in modern media, as well as mental health and disability representation. As for myself, I'm a big fantasy nerd who loves cats, collecting plushies, and drawing my heart out.
This book was recommended to me by my mentor, so it was one of the first queer graphic novels I ever got to experience. I love this book because it goes through so many of the hardships of being openly yourself. It’s nostalgic, it’s relatable, and it’s incredibly heartfelt.
While the main focus of Kiss Number 8 is exploring queer identity in young adulthood, my favorite part of this book is the relationship the main character has with her father and how that relationship struggles, changes, and grows over the course of the book.
Mads is pretty happy with her life. She goes to church with her family, and minor league baseball games with her dad. She goofs off with her best friend Cat, and has thus far managed to avoid getting kissed by Adam, the boy next door. It's everything she hoped high school would be - until all of a sudden, it's not.
Her dad is hiding something big - so big it could tear her family apart. And that's just the beginning of her problems: Mads is starting to figure out that she doesn't want to kiss Adam - because the…
A wise (and wily) Jedi once said that “many of the truths we cling to depend greatly on our own point of view,” and I’m fascinated by storytelling that gives you more than one point of view or voice to ponder. Even as a kid, I searched for books that delved into the minds of more than one character. I’ve explored this in my own writing but also as a teacher working with undergraduate students who were finding their own voices while exploring the literary voices of others. I also love so-called genre fiction—the fantasy, sci-fi, and romance of it all—which is definitely reflected in this list, well!
Carmen’s point of view in this novel is just as gripping as Dani’s in We Set the Dark on Fire, and her love for Dani is just as compelling. I’ll admit that it took me long enough to recover from Dani’s story that I didn’t immediately read this one when it was published, which was an error in judgment on my part. Because learning the flip side of a rebellion and a love story was even more satisfying than I thought it would be.
In this nail-biting sequel to Tehlor Kay Mejia's critically acclaimed fantasy novel We Set the Dark on Fire, La Voz operative Carmen is forced to choose between the girl she loves and the success of the rebellion she's devoted her life to. Perfect for fans of The Handmaid's Tale and Anna-Marie McLemore.
Being a part of the resistance group La Voz is an act of devotion and desperation. On the other side of Medio's border wall, the oppressed class fights for freedom and liberty, sacrificing what little they have to become defenders of the cause.
As a reader and a writer, I am drawn to the darker side of human nature. Dysfunctional families, toxic relationships, liars, murderers, bring on the bad. An avid reader of horror and thrillers, I love a jaw-dropping twist. I aim for that feeling in my own novels, opening up reader questions and slowly delivering satisfying answers until the final big reveal. While inside my head is very dark and murdery, outside I live a very normal, law-abiding life, in Tampa with my husband, our four kids, and two dogs.
John Marrs is one of my favorite authors, and this book is what got me hooked on his work. This is not your typical thriller, or your typical plot. So buckle up because you are in for a ride. You think you’ve read about dysfunctional families? Wait until you meet Maggie and Nina. Just your run-of-the-mill mom and daughter, hanging out, eating dinner, until mom gets sent back to the attic where she’s chained and being held captive—um what?! Dark, disturbing, with unreliable narrators, it’s everything I love in a domestic thriller and more.
Nina can never forgive Maggie for what she did. And she can never let her leave.
They say every house has its secrets, and the house that Maggie and Nina have shared for so long is no different. Except that these secrets are not buried in the past.
Every other night, Maggie and Nina have dinner together. When they are finished, Nina helps Maggie back to her room in the attic, and into the heavy chain that keeps her there. Because Maggie has done things to Nina that can't ever be forgiven, and now she is paying the price.
I first started lying as a child and was fascinated to discover that the art of deception could turn into full-time employment as either a politician or an author (I choose the one with moderately better hours and substantially worse pay). As someone who crafts elaborate lies for the purposes of entertainment, I remain fascinated by people who lie for nefarious ends, something I swear I’d never do. (Except for the time I snuck into a music festival by pretending to be one of the catering staff, earning me the dubious distinction of being one of very few people to ever appear in a Metallica moshpit wearing a waiter’s uniform.)
We all have secrets. If you read that sentence and thought “not me!” then that’s likely because you’ve repressed something so dark and dangerous that your psyche let you unleash it from the depths of your unconscious into your working memory.
This book looks at the myriad ways that holding onto secrets can affect our relationships and day-to-day lives through an engaging blend of personal, creative, and scientific perspectives.
Peppered with both fun tidbits of information (the average person has thirteen secrets), as well as complex, deeper insights into the science of secrets, I found this fascinating both as a general reader and more specifically as someone who writes characters who are burdened with secrets and have to construct a false reality around them.
'If you've ever wondered why we keep secrets and what motivates us to spill them, look no further' Adam Grant, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Think Again
An eye-opening look at why we keep the secrets we keep, how to better understand and cope with them, and when (and how) we should bring them to light.
Think of a secret that you're keeping from others. It shouldn't take long. Psychologist Michael Slepian finds that, on average, we are keeping as many as thirteen secrets at any given time. His research, involving more than 50,000 participants from around the…
As a doctor, writer, and mother of middle schoolers, I was ready to scintillate the sixth-graders when I volunteered for the chicken wing dissection class, demonstrating the exciting connection between muscles, tendons, and bones. I opened and closed the wing, placed it in their hands, and showed them the thin strips of tissue coordinating all the action. Did I see fascination? Excitement? Feigned interest of any sort? Sadly, no. They were much more enthusiastic about a different topic I volunteered for. Mythology. Greek gods. Beasts with multiple heads. They knew everything, and I knew books like Rick Riordan’s The Lightning Thief series were the reason. Books can entertain and educate.
Another great series from Rick Riordan. Set somewhat in the real world, a brother and a sister who don’t look alike discover they are descended from long line of a family of both Egyptian pharaohs and magicians. They have special talents to battle gods from Egyptian mythology and must save their father and the world.
Again, so much history and mythology packed into an exciting adventure story. Our whole family loved it.
The Red Pyramid: the first book in Rick Riordan's The Kane Chronicles.
Percy Jackson fought Greek Gods. Now the Gods of Egypt are waking in the modern world...
'I GUESS IT STARTED THE NIGHT OUR DAD BLEW UP THE BRITISH MUSEUM . . .'
CARTER AND SADIE KANE'S dad is a brilliant Egyptologist with a secret plan that goes horribly wrong. An explosion shatters the ancient Rosetta stone and unleashes Set, the evil god of chaos . . .
Set imprisons Dr Kane in a golden coffin and Carter and Sadie must run for their lives. To save their dad,…
As a mystery author, I’ve long been drawn to stories about missing persons, particularly novels featuring missing mothers. I suspect the special appeal of books about missing moms is because my own mother was M-I-A during my childhood. Whereas my older sisters lost our mother to mental illness at the tender ages of four and seven, in some ways, I was fortunate because I was an infant when our mom was institutionalized and, thus, had never fully bonded with her. And yet, the longing for my mother was ever-present. She left behind a large empty space in our family.
Having grown up in a waterfront community, I couldn’t resist this atmospheric thriller featuring a young woman drawn back to a small Southern town built around a lake. Years ago, her mother had abandoned her, leaving her with her stepfather. Or so she’s always been told.
But as she peels away family secrets and lies, she discovers that her mother never intended to leave her, and she has no idea who hurt her mother or who may be trying to silence her. The plot twists and sense of ever-present dread kept me reading long into the night!
Her father was the town detective. Her mother its most notorious criminal. Now the secrets of Mirror Lake are coming to the surface…and changing everything. "[A] stunning psychological thriller from one of the most insightful writers around” (CrimeReads), don’t miss the latest from Megan Miranda, the instant New York Times bestselling author of All the Missing Girls, The Last to Vanish, and The Only Survivors.
“Miranda…exposes revelation after twisty revelation…Small-town claustrophobia and intimacies alike propel this twist-filled psychological thriller” (Kirkus Reviews, starred review).
