Ten is when keen readers really start to blossom into avid readers.
At this age, I found a lot of my students were really starting to understand what characters they were drawn to and the types of genres they enjoyed too.
With that comes wanting a little extra from books. More complicated or twisty plots and imperfect characters getting a lot of things wrong.
It’s also the age where one child is obsessed with dragons and another only wants to solve mysteries (whilst avoiding a deadly assassin).
This page has over 450 books for 10 year olds, and these are the 23 I’d start with. If it’s a long series you’re after, I’ve also written about book series for 10 year olds.
Fantasy books for 10 year olds
Percy Jackson is twelve and has been thrown out of roughly one school a year, once over an incident with a shark pool.
Then his maths teacher takes him to one side, and afterwards nobody remembers she ever existed.
Oh, and his best friend turns out to be a goat from the waist down.
The Lightning Thief is the first Percy Jackson book and the pace is quick.
One thing worth knowing is that Percy watches a monster take his mother early on, and he grieves for a good while. For when they’ve finished the series, I’ve got what to read after Percy Jackson.
Percy Jackson and the Olympians 1 – The Lightning Thief
Animals have always come to Christopher.
Squirrels climb his legs, and a fox once tried to chew through his bedroom window latch.
When he’s sent to stay with his grandfather in the Scottish Highlands there’s one rule, which is never to go to the top of the hill.
Far away on a secret cluster of islands, a girl called Mal can fly in a coat that lifts her whenever the wind blows.
Impossible Creatures is by Katherine Rundell. A hired killer comes after Mal very early on and stabs her great-aunt, so the opening is a shock.
Impossible Creatures
Clay is a MudWing dragonet.
He’s been raised in a cave under a mountain with four other young dragons, because a prophecy says the five of them will end a war.
His battle teacher wants a killer, but Clay likes sleeping more than studying.
The Dragonet Prophecy is the first Wings of Fire book, and the five dragonets bicker like brothers and sisters.
It’s violent from the prologue on. Dragons are killed and a queen makes her prisoners fight in an arena, so it probably suits a reader who already likes fantasy with battles in it.
Wings of Fire 1: The Dragonet Prophecy
Eoin Colfer’s Artemis Fowl is twelve, white as a vampire from too many hours at a screen, and planning to help himself to a great deal of fairy gold.
Beside him is Butler, an enormous man who calls him sir.
A long way underground, Captain Holly Short is late for work and running low on magic.
The narrator is deadpan and makes fun of everyone.
Artemis is not a nice boy, and what he’s planning is a kidnapping. There are some sad scenes with his mother too, who on a bad afternoon doesn’t know who he is. Once they’re through the series, here’s what to read when you’ve finished Artemis Fowl.
Artemis Fowl
Rusty is a ginger house cat with dry food in his bowl and a bell on his collar.
On the other side of the garden fence there’s a wood he isn’t supposed to go into.
In that wood, four Clans of wild cats are fighting each other.
Into the Wild is the first Warriors book.
The cats call cars monsters, roads Thunderpaths and humans Twolegs, and nothing stops to explain any of it.
There’s blood in the fighting from the prologue on, and warriors die in this series. If they get hooked, I’ve got books like Warrior Cats.
Warriors 1 – Into the Wild
Mystery and spooky books for 10 year olds
Lemony Snicket warns you on the first page that The Bad Beginning does not go well.
Violet, Klaus and Sunny Baudelaire are at Briny Beach when Mr Poe from the bank arrives to tell them their parents have died in a fire.
They’re handed to Count Olaf, who has an eye tattooed on his ankle and wants the fortune their parents left.
The narrator keeps stopping to define words and to suggest you read something happier.
It’s one of our free books. The parents die in chapter one and nobody comes to the rescue, so it’s probably not for a reader who worries about that. For afterwards, there’s books like A Series of Unfortunate Events.
A Series of Unfortunate Events – The Bad Beginning
The day after her thirteenth birthday, Ivy Grey gets a letter from Rookwood School.
Her twin sister Scarlet was a pupil there, and the school says she died of a fever.
Now Ivy is to take her place and answer to her name.
Hidden inside Scarlet’s mattress is a diary with most of the pages torn out.
The Lost Twin is set in 1935 and it’s the first Scarlet and Ivy book.
Ivy misses her twin terribly and there are a lot of tears in the early chapters. I’ve got books like Scarlet and Ivy too.
Scarlet and Ivy 1 – The Lost Twin
It’s 1940 and May Wong is ten, nearly eleven.
She’s sure her big sister Hazel is a spy, so she pinches a note from Hazel’s handbag, runs away from boarding school and finds her way to a red door in London.
On the step is Eric, who got there by solving a newspaper crossword.
The grown-ups tell them to go home.
They go undercover as evacuees instead, at a house near Coventry where someone may be sending secrets to Berlin.
The Ministry of Unladylike Activity is by Robin Stevens. There’s real war in it, with bombed streets, a night in the Underground and a murder.
The Ministry of Unladylike Activity
Max Morel has never been out of France.
Then a great-aunt she barely knows phones from Istanbul, ill and needing company, and Max volunteers.
That means four trains across Europe with Sister Marguerite, a chess-playing nun who keeps pulling things out of her habit, like jelly beans, superglue and a pot plant.
Just before they leave, a famous diamond goes missing from a Paris vault.
Max gets out her notebook and starts a suspect list.
The Secret of the Night Train by Sylvia Bishop is the cosiest mystery of the five.
The Secret of the Night Train
Coraline counts fourteen doors in her new home.
Thirteen open, and the fourteenth has a brick wall behind it.
One rainy afternoon she’s alone, gets the keys down, and the bricks are gone.
On the other side is her own flat, only better, with another mother who has cooked something wonderful.
Everyone there has big black buttons where their eyes should be.
Coraline by Neil Gaiman is properly scary. For a stretch her real parents are missing and she’s on her own for the best part of two days. If scary is what they’re after, there’s a list of ghost stories for tweens.
Coraline
Funny books for 10 year olds
Maxwell Beckett has had twenty-nine negative points this month.
He knocked the head off his neighbour’s plastic flamingo with half a brick, and he once dumped a whole class’s maths books in the cafeteria bin.
Then a PE lesson goes badly wrong, and Maxwell gets erased.
Nobody knows who he is any more, which sounds brilliant at first.
The trouble is that if he was never born, nobody rescued his beagle, Monster.
The Day I Was Erased by Lisa Thompson is free. Maxwell’s parents argue all the time at home, and that part is quite raw.
The Day I Was Erased
Freddie loves facts.
A garden snail has over 14,000 teeth, for example.
When his Grams dies she leaves him an envelope with his birth certificate in it, and on it is the name of the father he’s never met.
So Freddie and his best mates Ben and Charlie each tell their parents they’re sleeping over at one of the others’ houses, and get on a train to Cardiff.
Charlie orders his burger in a Welsh accent that drifts into Irish.
The Super-Miraculous Journey of Freddie Yates is by Jenny Pearson. It’s very funny, and the sad bits about Grams are written with real feeling.
The Super-Miraculous Journey of Freddie Yates
Nikki Maxwell wanted a new phone for her new school, and her mum gave her a diary.
She swears she’ll never write in it and is back two days later.
She’s only at this posh private school because her dad won its bug extermination contract, and his van has a giant plastic cockroach on top.
Her locker is right next to MacKenzie Hollister’s, the most popular girl in the year, who is VERY mean.
Tales from a Not-So-Fabulous Life is the first Dork Diaries book.
Nikki is fourteen, so there are crushes, lip gloss and parties. I’ve written more about what age Dork Diaries is for.
Dork Diaries 1 – Tales from a Not-So-Fabulous Life
Adventure books for 10 year olds
Darkus Cuttle’s dad goes down to the vaults of the Natural History Museum, locks himself into a room with no windows and disappears.
All that’s left is a cold cup of coffee.
Darkus moves in with his Uncle Max, who wears a safari hat indoors, and sleeps in a hammock slung over the filing cabinets.
Then a beetle the size of a hamster drops out of a neighbour’s trouser leg and climbs onto his shoulder.
He names it Baxter.
Beetle Boy by M. G. Leonard is funny, with some sadness under the jokes, as Darkus’s mum died when he was seven.
Beetle Boy
Chaya is a thief, and she steals to help people in her village.
During the King’s feast she breaks into the Queen’s rooms and fills a pouch with sapphires and rubies, to pay for treatment for a boy who was attacked by a crocodile.
She gets away by diving underneath the King’s great elephant, Ananda.
Then the soldiers turn her village upside down, and her best friend Neel is arrested for her crime.
The Girl Who Stole an Elephant by Nizrana Farook is set on the island kingdom of Serendib, and it’s fast.
Neel is condemned to death for what she did, so it gets tense.
The Girl Who Stole an Elephant
Vita has crossed the Atlantic to New York because her grandfather has lost his home.
A millionaire called Victor Sorrotore took his old castle with a fake deed of sale.
So Vita walks into Sorrotore’s party and tells him to his face that he’s a thief.
She comes away knowing there’s an emerald the size of a lion’s eye still hidden at the castle, and she writes THE PLAN in a red notebook.
The Good Thieves is Katherine Rundell again, this time in the 1920s.
Vita had polio when she was five and her left foot hurts constantly, which she never mentions to anyone. Sorrotore is chilling, so it’s probably for a reader who likes being a bit frightened.
The Good Thieves
Winter arrived five years ago and never left.
Mila lives in a cabin in the forest with her two sisters and her brother Oskar, and the four of them are arguing about how to cook a cabbage when the dogs start barking.
Outside is a man on a horse the size of a barn, with a dozen boys on ponies behind him.
By morning the men have gone and so has Oskar.
The Way Past Winter by Kiran Millwood Hargrave reads like an old folk tale, and it’s free.
The stranger is unsettling, and the children’s father walked out into the snow five winters ago and never came home.
The Way Past Winter
Peter found Pax as a fox kit and brought him up, and they have never been apart.
Then Peter’s father enlists, and on the drive to his grandfather’s the car stops at the edge of a wood.
Peter throws Pax’s favourite toy soldier into the trees.
When the fox comes back with it in his mouth, the engine is already running.
Sara Pennypacker tells half of Pax from the boy’s side and half from the fox’s, who reads the world by smell.
It’s one of our free books. This one means to be sad, and there’s an early memory of a baby rabbit caught in a trap.
Pax
Real-life stories for 10 year olds
Three weeks into term, a new boy called Ahmet is given the spare seat in the last row.
He doesn’t talk, he doesn’t smile, and he disappears at every break.
The story is told by one of four friends, aged nine and three-quarters, who brings a lemon sweet to the school gate for him every day.
Then a grown-up at the gate says the words ‘refugee kid’, and none of the friends knows what that means.
The Boy at the Back of the Class by Onjali Q. Rauf is funny as well as sad. The narrator’s dad died in a car crash a few years before the story starts.
The Boy at the Back of the Class
Addie loves sharks, her pocket thesaurus and the quiet of the school library.
She’s autistic, and her new teacher rips up her story in front of the class because of her messy handwriting.
Then the class starts a project on the Scottish witch trials, and Addie learns that some of the women came from her own village.
She stands up at the village committee meeting and asks for a memorial.
The grown-ups say no, so she keeps asking.
A Kind of Spark is by Elle McNicoll. The teacher is cruel and the witch trials are described plainly, so it’s upsetting in places.
A Kind of Spark
Mia Tang is ten, and her family came to America from China two years ago.
Her parents take a job running a little motel in California for a man called Mr Yao, who changes the deal within two days.
While they scrub the rooms, Mia runs reception.
Customers keep asking for the manager, so she makes a sign that says Mia Tang, Manager and stares at them until they hand over the money.
Front Desk by Kelly Yang is funny, and honest about how it feels when money is always short. Mia’s family meet some unkind attitudes about where they come from.
Front Desk
It’s half past eleven on a Monday night, and Becket Rumsey is sitting in his dad’s fish van.
An hour ago Dad woke him and his little brother Billy, threw everything into boxes, strapped Mum’s old armchair onto the roof and drove them to the seaside.
They’ve left Dad’s girlfriend Pearl behind, and they’re not to ring her.
So Becket starts working out how to get her back.
The Boy Who Sailed the Ocean in an Armchair by Lara Williamson is free. Becket is funny and, underneath it, very sad. His mum died when he was four and he never said goodbye to her.
The Boy Who Sailed the Ocean in an Armchair
Cessie is eleven and should be practising her violin.
An old man with a long straggly ponytail has been standing in the rain across the road all day, staring at her house.
When he rings the bell he says he’s her grandad, and that he last saw her dad nearly fifty years ago.
He calls himself Popsicle and makes duck noises in the park.
Her dad can barely bear to be near him.
Escape from Shangri-La is another of our free books. Early on Popsicle collapses at the kitchen table, and there’s a frightening night at the hospital. It’s by Michael Morpurgo, and I’ve put together the best Michael Morpurgo books as well.
Escape from Shangri-La
More books for 10 year olds
Those 23 are somewhere to begin. Every other book for this age is further down the page, and each one has been hand-picked.
If there’s a drive coming up, I’ve got the best books for a long car journey. And for the book they’ve given up on halfway through, here’s my piece on whether a child should finish every book they start.
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