10 of the Best New Children’s Books Out September 2024

This is a joyful celebration of play and accessibility by two disabled moms and activists. Told in sing-song rhyming words, the beautiful and realistic illustrations portray children and adults with a vast array of disabilities sharing time together. On one page, a child sits in her mother’s lap, holding a seashell as her mother rolls on the boardwalk in a wheelchair with a tube in her mouth. On another page, a child communicates with a tablet to tell their adult they want to look at the stars with a telescope. Each page is joyful yet nuanced. For instance, one page depicts a caregiver in pain reading a book with a child. Back matter includes a disability guide for kids, a list of common disabilities and what they are, and a guide for adults. This picture book is special to me because one of the authors has POTS, like me! It was so nice being able to talk to my daughter about my own disability with a picture book that discusses it as well.

I have written before about the need for more disability representation in early chapter books, and now, here’s this wonderful new series starring a Lebanese American wheelchair user. Adeline is both nervous and excited about the first day of school. She’s eager to make friends and learn, but she’s nervous about how people will react to her wheelchair, having experienced ableism and lack of accessibility her entire life. Thankfully, her best friend Maya is in the same class, so she knows she already has a friend. When a classmate invites them to a birthday party at a skating rink, Adeline is a little nervous about accessibility. She wants to invent ways to make her world more accessible, but her mom says those plans would take a lot of time and tools to make happen. This is a great back-to-school chapter book with big text that makes it easy to read for new readers.

This is a clever and fun middle grade time travel mystery set in Brooklyn, New York, and Coney Island. Roya wants to be an investigative journalist when she grows up, and she currently has a podcast where she unravels mysteries concerning her apartment neighbors. Her mother works as the apartment’s superintendent, and her father has cancer and is in the hospital. When Roya overhears her favorite two neighbors talk about a family curse in the laundry room, she’s intrigued. The curse involves a fortune-telling machine called Grandmother on Coney Island. Roya means to solve the mystery of the curse with the help of her new friend and neighbor Amin. I listened to this on audio and really enjoyed the narration by Nikki Massoud.

This is a lovely middle grade verse novel about a Syrian American boy, Kareem, in 2016. Kareem longs to join the school’s football team, but to do so he feels like he has to let himself be bullied by the coach’s son, Austin, who forces Kareem to do his homework. Kareem’s grandfather is sick in Syria, and his mom flies over to bring him back to the U.S. for treatment. However, Trump enacts the Muslim ban, trapping his mom and grandparents in Syria. Meanwhile, Kareem has been tasked with showing a new Syrian student around the school and making him feel welcome, but doing so makes him even more of a target for Austin. I enjoyed the combination of an immigrant and a football story.

This is a fun first book in a new middle grade fantasy series based on Ghanaian folklore. Twelve-year-old Kwame Powell has been raised in the U.S., but his parents and grandmother are from Ghana. He’s depressed after his grandmother dies, and when a monkey grabs the dashiki his grandmother made him, he gives chase. His best friend Autumn, who is deaf, joins him. The two end up in the Ghanaian underworld on a quest not only to save a dashiki but to save humanity. This is a blast to listen to on audio, which is performed by Joshua Quinn.

This is one of my favorite books of the year. I was blown away by its complexity and beauty in capturing the lives of these two famous fantasy authors. It’s a text-heavy nonfiction graphic novel focusing on the friendship between C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien. While labeled as middle grade, it transcends age categorization. Anyone who loves these two authors, regardless of age, will enjoy it. The story is told by Gandalf and Aslan, who also take small moments to define myth and fairytales while exploring the lives of Lewis and Tolkien. The pair opens with Lewis’s and Tolkien’s childhoods, then follow them through their early education and time spent as soldiers in WWI until the fateful day the two meet and bond over a shared love of Norse mythology. I plan on buying a print copy when this releases. I expect this will be nominated for some awards.