Read The Museum of Lost and Found free in the Little Reads app.
Leila Sales's The Museum of Lost and Found is a gentle, honest story for 9 year olds about a girl whose best friend slowly drifts away without ever saying why.
Vanessa and Bailey have been best friends since second grade. They met over a Gibby Giraffe toy, and they even signed a certificate promising to stay friends forever.
Now Bailey's messages are getting shorter. She's always with her new friends. And then Vanessa realises Bailey had a birthday party and didn't invite her. Ouch.
Around the same time, on a walk she calls EGL (Explore and Get Lost, but nobody's allowed to know that), Vanessa finds an abandoned museum at the end of a dead-end street. It's dusty, empty and full of broken glass, and it's all hers.
So she decides to make it a museum again. A museum of Bailey. A friendship bracelet, a comic book they loved and the one issue of their gossip magazine each go in a display case with a numbered label. If she lays their whole story out clearly enough, maybe she'll finally see where it went wrong.
It's such a relatable way into something that happens to so many kids. There's no big fight and no villain, and that's exactly what makes it hurt. Vanessa feels foolish, then guilty, then sure it's all somehow about her. Her mum keeps telling her that not everything is about her. Vanessa isn't convinced.
There's plenty of fun around the edges too. Her big brother Sterling cheerfully offers to kick Bailey's butt (their mum is not impressed). And a Hebrew school trip to a museum goes sideways when the class clown decides a Torah pointer is really for picking your nose.
A couple of things you might want to know. Vanessa gets into the museum by climbing through a broken window past a No Trespassing sign, and she doesn't tell her mum. She picks at the skin round her nails when she's anxious, and her family notice. There's also a short, careful passage about the Holocaust on the school trip, where Vanessa remembers her great-great-grandmother was killed in a camp.
If your reader has ever lost a friend and couldn't work out what happened, this will feel very true. It might even help them talk about it.
For another girl dropped by her oldest friend, try Best Wishes. Becca's best friend suddenly can't come to her birthday sleepover, and seems to spend every spare minute with the chess champion instead.
A library hand-picked by an English teacher, delivered through a calm, ad-free app. If your child already loves reading, we keep up.
No trial. No payment. Just download.
