The Best of Both Worlds: Reading Magical Realism
Reading magical realism can be a great way for kids to explore elements of the world they know while also using their imagination to fill in the mystical or fantastic features of the story. For middle schoolers, especially, it’s important to support their creativity as they grow up and enter adulthood!
Check out these and other great magical realism reads:
1. The Someday Suitcase
When Danny gets sick with an illness no doctor can cure, it becomes clear that he’s only better when his best friend Clover is around. Desperate for a cure, will science be able to save him, or is this the one time when hope and magic will overcome the unthinkable?
2. The Remarkable Journey of Charlie Price
After the death or their mother, Charlie’s sister begins acting strange and he discovers that she’s been traveling to a parallel world where their mother is still alive. But something about this world isn’t right, and if Charlie can’t uncover the truth, he may just lose everything he holds dear.
3. Sputnik’s Guide to Life on Earth
When his ailing grandfather can no longer care for him, Prez is sent to the country to live with a foster family, where he meets Sputnik — a kid who is more than a little strange. Sputnik is an alien with a mission that requires Prez’s help: the Earth has been marked for destruction and they must come up with ten reasons why the planet should be saved!
4. The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe
This classic children’s book follows four adventurous siblings, Peter, Susan, Edmund, and Lucy Pevensie as they step through an enchanted wardrobe into the land of Narnia. Filled with talking animals and a powerful witch, the siblings must work with the Great Lion, Aslan, to free Narnia from the White Witch’s wrath.
5. Coraline
When Coraline discovers another world through a door in her new home, she is transported to a house just like her own, only better. That is, until the parents in this other home decide they want Coraline to stay with them and be their little girl. Other children are trapped in the apartment as well, and now Coraline must fight with all her wits to save them, her ordinary life, and herself!
6. The Wildwood Chronicles
When Prue’s baby brother is abducted by crows and taken to the Impassable Wilderness, a tangled forest on the edge of Portland, she and her friend Curtis set out to rescue him. In the wilderness, they discover a secret world full of warring creatures and must find a way to rescue Prue’s brother and make it out alive.
7. Breadcrumbs
Hazel and Jack are best friends, at least, they were until Jack stopped talking to her and disappeared into a forest with a mysterious woman made of ice. Now, Hazel must go in after him and rescue her best friend, but will Jack be the same as before he went into the woods?
8. Joplin, Wishing
Joplin makes a wish on a platter she finds in her grandfather’s house: first, she wants to find a friend at school, and second, she wishes she could befriend the girl pictured in the platter. When both wishes come true, she learns a terrible secret and must now help save Sofie, the girl in the platter, from a sinister foe who could put them all in terrible danger.
9. Watch Hollow
Siblings Lucy and Oliver Tinker discover a world where magic exists and monsters roam in the shadows when their father is hired to fix a broken clock in a mysterious, run-down mansion.
Magical realism blends reality with fiction to give you the best of both. Comment to tell us some of your favorite magical realism books and don’t forget to check out Corey Ann Haydu’s THE SOMEDAY SUITCASE. For more information visit us at www.harpercollins.com.
