Jill Santopolo’s
Young Adult & Kids Favorites

This book of 25 experiments kids can do alone–or with their families–using common household items is a ton of fun and particularly perfect during this time of remote schooling and social distancing. I’ve sent a copy to at least ten kids in the past six weeks and have gotten videos back of bubble snakes and pretty fantastic puffy slime.

This is another one of my go-to kid gifts. It’s a celebration of curiosity and shows the way differences are what make the world–and all of us–special. The interactive questions make the book especially accessible and a fun read-aloud for little ones. The letter from Justice Sotomayor directly to kid readers is lovely, and the art is truly stunning.

This is a perfect family read-aloud for older elementary-school-age kids. The story is filled with magic, adventure, mystery and family fun, and it will keep kid and adult readers alike guessing what’s going to happen next. (The sequel,A Clatter of Jars
, is also wonderful.) Of course, it’s fine for independent reading, too, but then parents will miss out on a great story.

I’ve given this book to almost every teenage boy I know, and to some grown men as well. This is nonfiction written like fiction, and tells the fascinating story of the first American Olympic basketball team, who competed for the first time in the 1936 Olympic Games in Hitler’s Germany, along with Jesse Owens and the The Boys in the Boat. This is definitely one of those “buy it for your kid, read it for yourself” books.

This book might be “buy it for yourself, loan to to your teen.” It gorgeously depicts Spanish life under the dictatorship of Francisco Franco and is one of the few novels in the world to explore the story of the babies that were stolen during this regime. It’s a tense, beautifully-written historical novel–with a hint of a love story– that is hard to put down. It’s perfect or teens and adults who loved The Book Thief and The Nightingale.