How do you find a brilliant chapter book for 10 year olds? The obvious answer is, of course, to Google it. But in my experience, it often just spits out a huge list of series.
Sometimes all you want is a cracking standalone. An excellent chapter book that’s not the start of a mammoth series. Series, of course, serve a purpose, but so do standalone books. It’s nice to have the option of both at your disposal if you’ve got an avid reader on your hands.
The five here aren’t part of a series in our library, so each one is a whole story with its own ending. They’re Starboard, Duncan Versus the Googleys, The Nowhere Thief, The Jamie Drake Equation and A Talent for Trouble.
Each is filed at age 10 in the app. Our books for 10 year olds page has plenty more.
Why a single book at 10
A series is lovely when a child wants to stay with the same people for months. A single book suits the child who wants a proper ending and then something completely different.
Four of these five have a narrator who talks straight to the reader. A few also have something sad underneath the jokes, and I’ve pointed it out where it comes up.
Five chapter books for 10 year olds
Starboard by Nicola Skinner
Starboard
Kirsten Bramble has been on the telly since she was seven and a half, ever since a video she made to find her dad a girlfriend went viral. Now the show has been dropped, the money is running out and she has no real friends at school.
Then her class visits the SS Great Britain in Bristol. Kirsten puts her hands on the ship’s wheel, and the museum ship smashes out of her dock and into the harbour with Kirsten on board. Olive, the ex-best friend she’d rather avoid, is on board too.
The narrator keeps popping in with cheeky asides, and Dad explains everything with maths. Under the jokes is a lonely girl who has been pretending she’s fine for a long time.
Duncan Versus the Googleys by Kate Milner
Duncan Versus the Googleys
For the child who likes an odd mystery.
Duncan’s parents are off to Japan to build a tree house, so he’s left for the summer with Great Aunt Harriet at Arthritis Hall. The manager, Mrs Linoleum Grunt, confiscates his robot pet within minutes. The old ladies seem to have vanished, there are cameras everywhere and a helipad on the roof, and a boy from a TV advert for a toy called a Googley has just stepped out of the lift.
Ursula, the caretaker’s daughter, sleeps in a cardboard bed and moves through the walls like a ghost. Something up in the attic keeps asking her for juice. There are a couple of creepy moments, and if those go down well, the ghost stories for tweens are a good next step.
The Nowhere Thief by Alice Ross
The Nowhere Thief
If they love a bit of fantasy.
Elsbeth can feel a shimmer in the air, step through it into a dark, silent place she calls Nowhere, and come out in another version of the world. In one the cat has two tails. In another a wave is rolling over the rooftops towards her.
She brings strange things home to sell in Mum’s antiques shop, because nobody’s buying and the landlord keeps putting the rent up. Then a man with a twirly moustache buys three of her antiques, asks for more and tells her to be careful. Elsbeth keeps telling herself she isn’t really a thief, and she doesn’t quite believe it.
The Jamie Drake Equation by Christopher Edge
The Jamie Drake Equation
Funny, with a lot of real space science in it.
Jamie’s dad is an astronaut on the International Space Station, and his big spacewalk falls on Jamie’s birthday. Jamie is living with Granddad Neil, a retired heavy metal singer who practises guitar in the barn, VERY loudly. He climbs Beacon Hill for some peace, finds an observatory that’s meant to be abandoned, and plugs his phone into the wrong cable. Something starts downloading from the Hubble Space Telescope.
Mostly Jamie just misses his dad, and their calls are short, with a delay on the line. Christopher Edge also wrote The Infinite Lives of Maisie Day, where Maisie comes downstairs on her tenth birthday to an empty house and nothing at all outside the front door.
A Talent for Trouble by Natasha Farrant
A Talent for Trouble
A boarding-school story in a Scottish castle, with pigs.
Alice is eleven and would rather write stories than talk to anybody. Her aunt puts her on the night train to Stormy Loch, a school in a castle where every pupil is meant to have a Talent and the headmaster keeps a kitten in his jacket pocket. On the train she makes a friend, Jesse, who lets her down the moment they arrive. And on the radio, somebody has stolen a jade carving of a boy riding a dragon.
The narrator talks to you like a tour guide and keeps dropping hints about the betrayals to come. Alice’s mum died four years before the book starts, and Alice and her aunt take the white rosebush planted for her with them in a pot.
More single books worth a look
Storm is also by Nicola Skinner, and it’s very funny and very angry. Frankie Ripley tells it, and near the start she says, quite calmly, that she has died. That will be too close for some children, though the jokes keep coming all the way through.
In The House on the Edge, Faith lives in a tall old house on a crumbling cliff, and a crack opens in the back garden overnight. Her little brother says a sea ghost lives in the cellar. Her mum is struggling badly, and the book doesn’t hide it.
Running On Empty is about AJ, who lives near the Olympic Stadium in London and is certain he’ll be a great runner. His grandad sorted out all the bills and died two months ago, so AJ has decided to sort everything out himself.
Alex, the Dog and the Unopenable Door starts with a school essay about dogs that gets an F and turns into a quest into the Forbidden Land, with a talking dog. The bullying is relentless.
If it’s a series they’re after
For a child who wants the same characters for months, book series for 10 year olds has five to start, Percy Jackson among them. For something a bit shorter, chapter books for 9 year olds is one step back.
Just so you know…
Every book I’ve mentioned is in Little Reads. It’s a children’s library app with 3,000+ hand-picked books, and it costs £7.99 a month after a 7-day free trial. Cancel anytime. A free account comes with 100+ free books.
It’s for the 10 year old who reads everything and always needs the next book lined up.