Here are 92 books that The Last Last-Day-of-Summer fans have personally recommended if you like
The Last Last-Day-of-Summer.
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I’m an avid reader and writer of children’s literature, though I find it difficult to read anything that isn’t diverse these days. Being able to experience the world from the perspectives of other cultures is a true delight, and I learn something every time. After having read dozens of these diverse books, especially diverse fantasies, I find that nothing inspires my creative soul more. That’s why I’m able to speak on this topic for large conferences and schools, spreading this inspiration to others. And, as a published author of diverse children’s literature, I’ve done the same in my writing with praise from Kirkus, Booklist, Publisher’s Weekly, and many others.
Amari Peters is a Black girl from a low-income housing project with a lot of heart.
Yet when she’s sent to the Bureau of Supernatural Affairs and discovers the world of the supernatural, she must compete with other students who have enjoyed a lot of privilege. It isn’t just that the world around Amari is spectacular and well-built, but we’re getting a glimpse into her challenges both at home and at this new school.
I loved being in the perspective of someone who never thought they could be a hero before. Someone who looks at things from a different lens can help us build a whole lot of empathy.
An epic middle grade supernatural adventure series, soon to be a major movie starring Marsai Martin. Perfect for readers aged 8+ and fans of Percy Jackson, Skandar and the Unicorn Thief and Men in Black.
Amari Peters knows three things.
Her big brother Quinton has gone missing. No one will talk about it. His mysterious job holds the secret...
So when Amari gets an invitation to the Bureau of Supernatural Affairs, she's certain this is her chance to find Quinton. But first she has to get her head around the new world of the Bureau,…
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…
I’m a children’s book writer from Frisco, Texas. I’ve published two middle grade chapter books, Pippa Park Raises Her Game and Pippa Park Crush at First Sight. I’ve always been captivated by novels that make me hungry; you can blame formative children’s books like If You Give a Mouse a Cookie or Stone Soup for that. That’s why today I’m sharing my top 5 favorite middle grade books that have a foodie twist. Some of them revolve entirely around food; others simply offer a notable scene. Either way, I hope you’ll find them as delectable as I do!
Eleven-year-old Mimi is the youngest child in a family full of high-achievers. Determined to prove herself, she enters a baking contest at a newly opened bakery in town, but when strange things begin happening to those around her (such as her food critic dad losing his sense of taste), Mimi must pair her culinary skills with her detective skills to get to the bottom of the magical mystery.
If I had to pick one word to describe this book, it’d be: sweet. Plus, this adorable book is also a retelling of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. And if you know me, you know I adore retellings!
A Kirkus Best Book of 2019! An Indies Introduce Selection for 2019! An Indie Next Pick for Summer 2019!
"A delectable treat for food and literary connoisseurs alike." Kirkus Reviews, STARRED REVIEW
"What a wonderful, intriguing, and magical book. And wow, did it ever get my tastebuds going! Each time I picked it up, I felt the urge to head to my kitchen. . . . What I loved most was the smartness of it. It never once doubted its young readers." Kathi Appelt, Newbery Honor- and National Book Award-Nominated author
"Midsummer's Mayhem is an enchantment of a novel, bursting…
I love books. All kinds of books. Growing up, I didn’t have many friends outside of books. It’s no wonder that as an adult reader/writer/editor/book coach, I still read widely and voraciously. I believe all stories are magical, but I’m especially drawn to books that contain emotionally engaging characters and fun magical elements. I’m also a huge fan of good KidLit and getting a chance to see and explore other cultures and worlds, both real and imagined. (I even co-host a podcast: Coaching KidLit.) So, I read a ton of magical stories and a lot of KidLit. That’s how I discovered the books on this recommended reading list.
Creative and deeply layered, this book has so much on offer: multiple universes, a boy who can talk to fish, a city built of rafts, sea monsters, and wonderfully clever and well-drawn characters. An absolutely beautiful and emotionally engaging story of escaped slaves and refugees fleeing for their lives seeking a new home and freedom. I was totally swept away.
An enchanting historical fantasy adventure perfect for fans of Thanhha Lai's Newbery Honor-winning Inside Out and Back Again
No one comes to the Second World on purpose. The doorway between worlds opens only when least expected. The Raft King is desperate to change that by finding the doorway that will finally take him and the people of Raftworld back home. To do it, he needs Pip, a young boy with an incredible gift-he can speak to fish; and the Raft King is not above kidnapping to get what he wants. Pip's sister Kinchen, though, is determined to rescue her brother…
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…
I love books. All kinds of books. Growing up, I didn’t have many friends outside of books. It’s no wonder that as an adult reader/writer/editor/book coach, I still read widely and voraciously. I believe all stories are magical, but I’m especially drawn to books that contain emotionally engaging characters and fun magical elements. I’m also a huge fan of good KidLit and getting a chance to see and explore other cultures and worlds, both real and imagined. (I even co-host a podcast: Coaching KidLit.) So, I read a ton of magical stories and a lot of KidLit. That’s how I discovered the books on this recommended reading list.
Not only does this book have a strong female lead, a scary, spooky adventure, and an unusual friendship where cousins who start off not liking one another have to work together, or else, but the idea that a funeral home guards another realm. I love it. And Chuck Wendig really nailed the voice of this story! It’s totally Chuck-like, but not the creepy Chuck we get in his adult horror books. This is 100% snarky, goofy, yeehaw, let’s-have-a-rollicking-good-time kid-at-heart Chuck. Also, this one made me laugh out loud in places, and I can always use a good laugh.
?Thirteen-year-old Molly doesn't know how she got the short end of the stick-being raised by her neglectful father-while Dustin, the older brother she's never met, got their mother and the keys to the family estate. But now the siblings are both orphaned, she's come home for her inheritance, and if Dustin won't welcome her into the family business, then she'll happily take her half in cash.
There's just one problem: the family business is a mortuary for monsters, and Molly's not sure she's ready to deal with mysterious doors, talking wolves, a rogue devourer of magic, and a secret cemetery.…
I am a research fellow at the Institute for Frontier Areas of Psychology and Mental Health in Freiburg, Germany. I studied Psychology and Philosophy at the University of Fribourg (Switzerland) and Munich (Germany) and have a Ph.D. in Medical Psychology from the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich. Between 2004 and 2009 I was Research Fellow at the Department of Psychiatry, University of California San Diego. My research in the field of Cognitive Neuroscience is focused on the perception of time in ordinary and altered states of consciousness. The investigation concerning the riddle of subjective time as based on the embodied self leads me to answers of what matters most, the nature of our existence as self-conscious beings.
The debate on the nature of time between Henri Bergson, one of the most important philosophers at that time, and Albert Einstein, happened on April 6, 1922. Although many people believe that Einstein gained the upper hand in this showdown, comparable perhaps only with the ‘rumble in the jungle’ between Foreman and Ali in 1974, matters are more complicated. Jimena Canales has written a thriller about this clash of cultures fighting about time. She opens up a cosmos of philosophy and physics embedded in culture and shows how one hour of talk in 1922 still has relevance 100 years later for what it means to be human.
On April 6, 1922, in Paris, Albert Einstein and Henri Bergson publicly debated the nature of time. Einstein considered Bergson's theory of time to be a soft, psychological notion, irreconcilable with the quantitative realities of physics. Bergson, who gained fame as a philosopher by arguing that time should not be understood exclusively through the lens of science, criticized Einstein's theory of time for being a metaphysics grafted on to science, one that ignored the intuitive aspects of time. The Physicist and the Philosopher tells the remarkable story of how this explosive debate transformed our understanding of time and drove a…
Most people are surprised to hear I wasn’t a reader growing up. All the books I was assigned to read in school were too serious or sad. It wasn’t until I started reading comedy, that I really got into reading. Now, I read everything under the sun, but comedy is still what I love to write. I write the kind of books that I wish I had found as a tween. And to this day, the best compliment I receive is when a parent tells me one of my books made their kid laugh or better yet, turned their reluctant reader into a reader. As a writer, there’s no better feeling!
Imagine if you relived your 11th birthday over and over?
The answer is found in the pages of Wendy Mass’s delightful, sweet, and funny page-turner, 11 Birthdays! Pick up this book if you want to add a little magic to your day. It even has a little mystery to it. Bonus!
It's Amanda's 11th birthday and she is super excited-after all, 11 is so different from 10. But from the start, everything goes wrong. The worst part of it all is that she and her best friend, Leo, with whom she's shared every birthday, are on the outs and this will be the first birthday they haven't shared together. When Amanda turns in for the night, glad to have her birthday behind her, she wakes up happy for a new day. Or is it? Her birthday seems to be repeating itself. What is going on?! And how can she fix it?…
Throughout my life, I have been fascinated by humanity’s place within deeper time. As a boy, I collected rocks and fossils, and at university studied geology. The long term has also been a theme running throughout my journalism career at New Scientist and the BBC, and it inspired my research during a recent fellowship at Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the US. I believe we need to embrace a deeper view of time if we are to navigate through this century’s grand challenges – and if we can, there’s hope, agency, and possibility to be discovered along the way.
Vincent is a social anthropologist who spent a number of years in Finland completing a truly fascinating piece of fieldwork: he studied the people involved in planning the spent nuclear waste depository at Onkala.
This is a huge undertaking and responsibility, requiring its architects to project their minds tens of thousands of years into the future. Through his fieldwork, Vincent drew out various broader lessons for how to think longer-term.
What’s striking about Onkala is that the people involved in the planning are simply normal Finnish people tasked with an extraordinary job. To me that shows that deep time can be accessible to everyone, and indeed this is a theme that Vincent explores himself: seeking out long-term time in everyday experience can be cathartic, he argues.
A guide to long-term thinking: how to envision the far future of Earth.
We live on a planet careening toward environmental collapse that will be largely brought about by our own actions. And yet we struggle to grasp the scale of the crisis, barely able to imagine the effects of climate change just ten years from now, let alone the multi-millennial timescales of Earth's past and future life span. In this book, Vincent Ialenti offers a guide for envisioning the planet's far future—to become, as he terms it, more skilled deep time reckoners. The challenge, he says, is to learn…
I’m an archaeologist, which means that I’ve been lucky enough to travel to many places to dig and survey ancient remains. What I’ve realized in handling those dusty old objects is that all over the world, in both past and present, people are defined by their stuff: what they made, used, broke, and threw away. Most compelling are the things that people cherished despite being worn or flawed, just like we have objects in our house that are broken or old but that we keep anyway.
This looks like it’s the sternest and most boring book ever, but I love Steedman’s cool-and-collected ability to address the implications of the obvious: You can only do one thing at a time. You only have two hands. And when you’re with one set of belongings, you’re neglecting all the other stuff you own.
Standard economic theory of consumer behaviour considers consumers' preferences, their incomes and commodity prices to be the determinants of consumption. However, consumption takes time and no consumer has more - or less - than 168 hours per week. This simple fact is almost invisible in standard theory, and takes the centre stage in this book.
For many years, I’ve been creating visual nonfiction books for adults. These books are about climate change, indigenous sovereignty, and nuclear physics—not typical kids’ book fare. But because my books include artwork, everyone always asked me when I would write and illustrate a book for children. Once I had my own children, I was suddenly full of ideas. Children’s books are often underestimated. The best books of the genre are accessible enough to interest a young person, sophisticated enough to engage the adults reading them aloud, and multidimensional enough to reward countless re-readings. I believe books that meet this standard fit alongside civilization’s great works of literature.
I never tire of reading this brilliant book to my son. His imagination (and mine) goes to new places with each rereading. Each spread relocates the reader to another corner of the world, where we glimpse a snapshot of action: someone honks their car horn in a traffic jam in Mexico City, a volcano erupts in Papua-New Guinea, a woman drops a mysterious envelope on the sidewalk in Budapest.
For my son and I, the book has been as interactive as any game, offering endless possibilities for discussion and debate. Because each spread is a single moment, we can dream up our own interpretation of what might have led to this scene and what will unfold afterward. It’s wonderful to see wildly varied landscapes as we travel the planet.
Inspired by the question, "What are they doing right at this moment on the other side of the world?" this book focuses on natural and human events happening all over the world in the same second. Talking about the world and how it's so different in places but also so similar and shared, so incredible and surprising, the books takes us to New York, Chicago, Mexico, Portugal, Angola, Turkey, Greece, Italy, Hungry, Brazil, and South Africa, among others.
So, while you sit turning the pages of this book, things are happening everywhere. Somewhere, a wave is reaching the shore. Elsewhere,…
I was 14 years old when my dad was imprisoned by the communist police of ex-Yugoslavia. My dad spent his childhood working as a shepherd in a small Macedonian village with 11 inhabitants. Later, he became a poet, and he belonged to the last group of political prisoners in the former Yugoslavia. When my dad was sent to prison, my family and I dealt with great trauma.
How do we master trauma? Some books say that I should repeat what I already did, and other books say that I should choose something new. But this small book explains that both decisions are bad.
This book has taught me that neither repetition nor choosing the new heals. I should choose the recollection over the repetition. I already have all the knowledge I need to overcome it, which is already within me.
'The love of repetition is in truth the only happy love'
So says Constantine Constantius on the first page of Kierkegaard's Repetition. Life itself, according to Kierkegaard's pseudonymous narrator, is a repetition, and in the course of this witty, playful work Constantius explores the nature of love and happiness, the passing of time and the importance of moving forward (and backward). The ironically entitled Philosophical Crumbs pursues the investigation of faith and love and their tense relationship with reason.
Written only a year apart, these two works complement each other and give the reader a unique insight into the breadth…
