As a reader, there’s nothing worse than feeling like you’re in a bit of a slump. And as a young reader it can feel even worse because there are so many options to turn to.
Hopefully, I’ve got at least one solution to this problem.
This page has over 750 books for 9 year olds, and these are the 22 I’d start with. If they like a long run of books, I’ve also written about book series for 9 year olds and chapter books for 9 year olds.
Funny books for 9 year olds
Every Friday night, Ben is dropped at Granny’s bungalow for cabbage soup, cabbage pie and Scrabble.
He’s sure she’s the most boring person alive.
Then he goes looking for her secret tin of biscuits, and it’s full of diamonds.
Gangsta Granny is by David Walliams, and Raj at the newsagent’s is very funny on his own.
Ben and his parents are pretty unkind about Granny, and some of that lands hard. It asks your reader to think about how we treat older people. The rest of his books are in my best David Walliams books.
Gangsta Granny
Miles Murphy was the best prankster at his old school, and he has a notebook to prove it.
On his first morning at his new one, he finds the principal’s car parked at the top of the front steps.
Somebody here is already very good.
The Terrible Two is by Mac Barnett and Jory John, and when the principal has to get the car back down, you get all forty things that happen next, numbered.
The principal’s son spends a page listing places he could beat Miles up. It’s played for laughs, but a child being picked on in real life might not find it funny.
The Terrible Two
Peri has just started secondary school and set up a band with her best friend Cammy.
Cammy plays bongos made out of old tights.
Then a girl called Cara joins on spoons, and Cammy thinks she’s brilliant, and Peri is keeping score of every in-joke.
Petunia Perry and the Curse of the Ugly Pigeon is by Pamela Butchart, and it’s written in short, shouty bursts with lots of capitals.
There’s crush talk about a boy called Smile Boy, and a lot about friendships wobbling before the move up to big school. I’ve got more in my best Pamela Butchart books.
Petunia Perry and the Curse of the Ugly Pigeon
Forty-two days ago, monsters and zombies took over Jack Sullivan’s town.
His foster family drove off without him.
So now he lives in a tree house fortress, eating stale Oreos and treating the end of the world like a video game.
The Last Kids on Earth is by Max Brallier, and Jack talks to you like you’re his mate the whole way through.
The zombies are properly gross, and a monster crunches one up with the sound of snapping bones. Jack being left behind is played for laughs, but it might sting for some children.
The Last Kids on Earth
Magic and fantasy books for 9 year olds
Morrigan Crow gets blamed for everything in her town, from hailstorms to a spoiled batch of marmalade.
She’s cursed, and cursed children die on the night they turn eleven.
Then a stranger called Jupiter North turns up and whisks her away to a magical city, where she has to pass a run of trials to stay.
Nevermoor is by Jessica Townsend, and Morrigan is dry and prickly and funny.
It opens with her father talking to reporters about her death, and the family is unkind to her, so the start may be hard going for a child who’s sensitive about that. For when they’ve finished, there’s what to read after Harry Potter.
Nevermoor – The Trials of Morrigan Crow
Xar is the son of the King of the Wizards, and his magic hasn’t arrived yet.
So he decides to catch a Witch and take its magic, even though Witches are supposed to have died out centuries ago.
He sets off with five wolves, three snowcats, a bear, a giant and a talking raven whose feathers are falling out from the worry.
The Wizards of Once is by Cressida Cowell, and the narrator keeps leaning in to tell you what’s about to go wrong.
There’s a real war under the jokes. One people has already wiped out another and trespassers can lose their heads. None of it is dwelt on.
The Wizards of Once
Amari’s brother Quinton has been missing for six months, and the police think he’s dead.
Amari hasn’t stopped looking.
Then she finds something he left for her, and it turns out his secret job was with a hidden department that deals with magicians and aliens.
Amari and the Night Brothers is by B B Alston, and Amari has known about all of it for a week. Everyone else has known since birth.
The bullying at her school is racist and about money, and it’s quoted directly. Her mum breaks down in front of her in chapter one.
Amari and the Night Brothers
Betty Widdershins turns thirteen on Halloween and has a plan to sneak her little sister onto the ferry to the mainland.
Then the fog comes down and Granny appears on a boat she definitely didn’t board.
What Betty gets next is a pot of terrible sweet tea and the truth about three magic objects in the family.
A Pinch of Magic is by Michelle Harrison, and Betty is cross about being the last one told.
The opening is bleak. A girl waits in a prison tower to be taken to the gallows. The sisters’ mum is dead and their dad is in prison, and both come up plainly.
A Pinch of Magic
Milla is the youngest servant at the Yellow House, and she’s hiding up an orange tree when a stranger hangs a silk bag on her branch.
Inside are four dragon eggs.
In Arcosi, dragons haven’t been seen for years.
Dragon Daughter is by Liz Flanagan and it’s one of our free books. Milla notices everything and knows the city’s alleys like a cat.
A man is killed right below Milla’s branch in the first chapter, with blood on the tiles, so a child who finds violence upsetting may struggle with the opening.
Dragon Daughter
Adventure and animal books for 9 year olds
A baby is pulled out of the English Channel, floating in a cello case.
The scholar who rescues her decides on the spot that he’s keeping her, and he lets her eat her tea off a Shakespeare play and sleep on top of the wardrobe.
Sophie grows up sure her mother is still alive.
Rooftoppers is by Katherine Rundell, and Charles might be the best grown-up in any book on this page.
It opens with a ship going down, and much of the story is grown-ups telling Sophie her mother is dead. That may be a lot for a reader who has lost someone.
Rooftoppers
It’s 1910, and Maia is being sent from her London boarding school to live with relatives on the Amazon.
Her classmates helpfully list the piranhas, the alligators and the poisoned arrows.
So Maia goes to the library, reads until long after bedtime and comes back with a completely different Amazon.
Journey to the River Sea is by Eva Ibbotson, and Maia’s governess Miss Minton once broke her umbrella over a boy who was hurting a puppy.
Maia’s parents died before page one. It’s set in 1910, and the schoolgirls talk about the rainforest and the people who live there the way Edwardians did.
Journey to the River Sea
Feo lives in a Russian forest with her mother, teaching wolves that rich people got bored of how to be wild again.
Then a general knocks on the door, smashes up the house and gives an order.
From now on, any wolf the city sends will be shot.
The Wolf Wilder is also by Katherine Rundell, and these are not storybook wolves. Feo’s three eat ravens in a ruined chapel.
The general says a child with a stare like Feo’s would be beaten, and her mother comes back into the room with a bruise. A child who needs animals to be safe and adults to be sensible will find the first chapter hard.
The Wolf Wilder
A boy runs away from boarding school and meets an old woman who gives him tea and scones.
On the hillside outside her house is a lion that shimmers blue in the sunlight.
She tells him the story of Bertie, a boy in South Africa who saved a white lion cub.
The Butterfly Lion is by Michael Morpurgo, and it’s a story inside a story.
The opening has bullying and the fear of being caned at school, and the lion loses its mother. I’ve got more of his in my best Michael Morpurgo books.
The Butterfly Lion
Twitch keeps chickens and pigeons and has built himself a secret hide in Aves Wood.
On the last day of term he heads straight there, and the wood is full of police.
A prisoner has escaped, and he may be coming back for something hidden in the trees.
Twitch is by M. G. Leonard, and its hero’s only skills are sitting still and noticing things.
The bullying is nasty and there’s a lot of it. Boys throw Twitch in the bins and pin him down to force a worm into his mouth, so it’s worth knowing before a reader who finds cruelty hard starts it.
The Twitchers 1 – Twitch
Mystery and spooky books for 9 year olds
Matthew watches his street from the spare room window and writes down what everyone does, with the time beside it.
That’s how he knows the shiny black car is wrong.
Then the toddler next door falls into the pond, and Matthew is the only person who sees it.
The Goldfish Boy is by Lisa Thompson. Matthew has OCD and hasn’t been outside in weeks.
His OCD is the whole texture of the book, with hands cracked from washing, and he blames himself for a baby brother who died five years ago. It’s all in the opening chapters.
The Goldfish Boy
Sophie used to have a garden and a hair ribbon tied just so.
Now her father is gone, so is the money, and she sells hats at Sinclair’s department store in London.
The store’s big display is a tiara and a clockwork sparrow that plays a different tune every time.
The Mystery of the Clockwork Sparrow is by Katherine Woodfine, and you know exactly what’s going to happen to that sparrow.
Sophie’s father is gone before the story starts and the other shop girls are unkind to her all the way through, with no grown-up stepping in.
The Mystery of the Clockwork Sparrow
Sara is twelve and in court for hacking New York’s juvenile justice computers.
Then a tall British man with a burned hand walks in, says he’s her lawyer and gets her sent to a school run by someone called Trunchbull.
He isn’t a lawyer. He works for MI6, and he calls himself Mother.
City Spies is by James Ponti, and every agent on Mother’s team is named after the city they come from.
Sara’s foster parents locked a little boy in a cupboard, and the book tells that plainly. A child who has been in care might find those early pages hard. For more of this, there’s children’s spy books.
City Spies
Four children who aren’t friends are stuck in Saturday detention at Dread Wood High.
Then one of the school piglets vanishes, and soon after so does their teacher.
And why can the groundskeeper’s tiny, frail wife lift a well lid as heavy as a grown man?
Dread Wood is by Jennifer Killick, and Angelo tells it.
It’s properly scary. A teacher is pulled under the ground in front of the children, and there’s a bit of mild swearing. A jumpy reader might want it as a daytime book.
Dread Wood
Real-life stories for 9 year olds
August Pullman is ten, and he’s about to go to school for the first time.
He’s had twenty-seven operations on his face, and he won’t describe it to you.
He is, in his own word, petrified.
Wonder is by R. J. Palacio, and it’s much funnier than people expect. The story of the night he was born stars a nurse who couldn’t stop farting.
It’s about how other children react to Auggie’s face, and it doesn’t soften that. Children have run away screaming from him in playgrounds.
Wonder
Camp Green Lake has no lake.
It’s a dried-up desert where boys dig one hole a day, and the Warden owns the only shade.
Stanley Yelnats is there for something he didn’t do, which his family blame on his no-good-dirty-rotten-pig-stealing-great-great-grandfather.
Holes is by Louis Sachar, and every odd detail gets picked up again later.
Stanley is teased about his weight, and a teacher uses him in a maths lesson on ratios, so that bit will sting for a child who’s sensitive about their size. For afterwards, I’ve got books like Holes.
Holes
Lottie’s best friend Molly has moved to Australia, and Lottie has to start a new school without her.
Her dad tries to cheer her up with a Happy Meal.
She has a lot to say about that, and about everyone else in her family, in a diary full of cartoons.
The Extremely Embarrassing Life of Lottie Brooks is by Katie Kirby, and even the hamsters hear about her problems.
The diary talks about bullying, bras and worries about how she looks. If she’s a hit, I’ve got books like Lottie Brooks.
The Extremely Embarrassing Life of Lottie Brooks
Dan Hope is halfway through a peanut butter sandwich when his dad appears on the telly.
His dad left four years ago, and now he’s a presenter.
Dan decides this is brilliant news, and his sixteen-year-old sister Grace does not agree.
A Boy Called Hope is by Lara Williamson and it’s one of our free books. Dan’s jokes come thick and fast, and you can usually see what they’re covering up.
Dan’s dad left for someone else, and Dan overheard the row. For a child with a parent who isn’t around, some of it may land close to home.
A Boy Called Hope
More books for 9 year olds
Those 22 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 a book everyone can listen to, there are my family read-aloud books.
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