You won't believe what kids are reading now.

quote:

---

An auditorium of eager kids in Washington, Okla., were on the edge of their seats a few weeks ago as author Jennifer A. Nielsen told them about Lidia Durr Zakrzewski, a teenager who joined the Polish resistance during World War II. She served as the real-life model for the young heroine in Nielsen’s 2024 novel “Uprising.”

To the middle-grade audience, Nielsen was akin to a rock star, and she is a bit of one in the publishing world too. The types of books she often writes—historical novels about bombings, spies and young resistance fighters in World War II—have become some of the hottest novels with young readers starting around age 8.

Scholastic, one of the country’s leading children’s book publishers, is asking agents for more World War II fiction, even as the rest of the kids’ fiction market stagnates. At its book fairs, the publisher sees elementary and middle-school students darting over to the WWII bookcases, nabbing titles before they sell out. Books by authors like Nielsen and Alan Gratz have hit bestseller lists.

With tales of heroism and spycraft, battle scenes and bravery, Gratz and a coterie of other writers have tapped into many of the same themes that draw kids to the Harry Potter and Percy Jackson series. Instead of dragons, wizards and gods, there are Nazis and young resistance fighters.

In Nielsen’s thriller “Rescue,” 12-year-old Meg Kenyon becomes part of a dangerous mission through Nazi-occupied France. In Adam Gidwitz’s recent novel “Max in the Land of Lies,” 13-year-old Max Bretzfeld returns to Nazi Germany as a British spy. And in Alan Gratz’s “Heroes,” two friends live through the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.

“There is insatiable interest,” said Aimee Friedman, an editorial director at Scholastic and editor of one of the genre’s top authors, Gratz. The publisher looks for hot new titles and genres at its school fairs, she said, and quickly saw that kids wanted more: “World War II books are at the top of the list.”....

The hardcover edition of “Refugee” spent more than 280 weeks on the New York Times’s children’s middle-grade bestseller list and today has nearly 1.6 million copies in print.

Parents sometimes worry that the subject matter is too frightening for their kids, but advocates for the books say they provide a compelling opportunity to teach history.

“I tell them that these books aren’t so dark that their kids can’t read them,” said Valerie Koehler, owner of the Blue Willow Bookshop in Houston.
“For kids, it’s all about word-of-mouth,” said Sharon Hearn, founder of Children’s Book World in Los Angeles. Hot titles getting talked about include the 2024 book “The Bletchley Riddle,” by Ruta Sepetys and Steve Sheinkin, about two siblings caught up in the drama of World War II....

---