I’m qualified to talk about Hermione Granger because she’s a bold rip-off of my own experience at boarding school. My family didn’t have a lot of money. However, I was always the smartest, most original, hardest-working kid at school. Then I got a fat scholarship to an exclusive and fabulously wealthy boarding school 3,000 miles from home. I arrived as a poor, immigrant, POC, gay, transfer student into the eleventh grade. I was the muggle-born kid plopped into a world of privilege and power with something to prove, just like Hermione. But because the author did such a good job of capturing my life, I won’t sue.
A fourteen-year-old girl and her little brother leave their homeland to study at an academy that teaches a sport combining figure skating with kung fu. “It’s Hermione Granger meets Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon meets the Ice Capades meets Mean Girls.” — The New York Times
Nebula Award finalist, Parents’ Choice Foundation Silver Medal, multiple starred reviews, Amazon Top 500 Books bestseller
This book gets called “the Nigerian Harry Potter” a lot. It’s about a magical school sorta and the worldbuilding is delightful and includes things like pouty blue wasps that are diva artists, perimeter bushes that confiscate weapons, and other fantastical inventions that are unlike anything I’ve ever read. However, what I loved most was the unexpected spirit of the main character Sunny Nwazue. She’s not your typical middle grade heroine who is defined by self-doubt and who follows the expected rising self-esteem arc. Instead, she’s incredibly no-nonsense and is very focused on doing the work she needs to do, whether it’s mastering her magical heritage, or solving a serial killer mystery. This focus on work is something that I love about both Hermione and Sunny.
Affectionately dubbed "the Nigerian Harry Potter," Akata Witch weaves together a heart-pounding tale of magic, mystery, and finding one's place in the world.
Twelve-year-old Sunny lives in Nigeria, but she was born American. Her features are African, but she's albino. She's a terrific athlete, but can't go out into the sun to play soccer. There seems to be no place where she fits in. And then she discovers something amazing-she is a "free agent" with latent magical power. Soon she's part of a quartet of magic students, studying the visible and invisible, learning to change reality. But will it be…
Gratuity Tucci, the main character of The True Meaning of Smekday, isn’t like Hermione Granger on the surface. She’s a biracial, twelve-year-old girl who doesn’t respond to Earth being invaded by aliens by diving into books and solving everything like Hermione would. However, what she does share with Hermione is the ability to make me spray soy milk out of my nose all over the book. I’ve never laughed so hard reading any book. And I have zero sense of humor so that’s saying something. Bonus points for the audiobook version read by Bahni Turpin whose characterizations are so hilarious and plain different, that I challenge you not to imitate some of the lines she delivers.
The glorious leader of the Boovs, Captain Smek, has called for the invasion of Earth. But the plan goes very wrong when a cute and cuddly - and utterly hopeless - Boov makes a huge mistake. Now something much more dangerous is heading their way . . . Will human girl, Tip, be able to save her home?
The original and hilarious comic sci-fi adventure that inspired the major Dreamworks film, HOME.
Like many of the Potter books, this book is sort of a puzzle box built around an object that is governed by clear rules. The main character, Molly Moon, discovers a book that teaches her to control animals and people around her with the power of hypnotism. The book drops Molly's character into a clear set of rules and then has fun watching what she does with it, in a way that reminds me a bit of Hermione’s use of that special object in Prisoner of Azkaban. It also is a fantasy about unlimited power. Seriously, what if you could make anyone anywhere do anything you wanted them to?
Orphan Molly Moon was found as a baby in a box marked 'Moon's Marshmallows'.
For ten miserable years she's lived under the cruel rule of Miss Adderstone in grim Hardwick House. But her life changes overnight when she finds a mysterious book on hypnotism and discovers an amazing talent - the power to make people do anything she want them to. Escaping from the orphange, Molly flies to New York in search of fame and fortune. But her adventures in hypnotism lead her into the clutches of a dangerous enemy . . .
I did a Facebook post asking people for the best book starring a female main character by a male author. The number one response was True Grit. It’s a Western set in the 1860s about 14-year-old Mattie Ross, who seeks justice for the murder of her father by an outlaw. She’s incredibly capable and steely-willed, like Hermione. The world she inhabits is a bleaker one than the Wizarding World and the book isn’t marketed as a middle grade book. However, the character of Mattie carries the reader through the harsh world she inhabits. Mattie’s not a friendly person but there’s something that warms me up reading a story where the smartest, bravest, and most resourceful person is a determined young woman seizing her fate by the throat.
There is no knowing what lies in a man's heart. On a trip to buy ponies, Frank Ross is killed by one of his own workers. Tom Chaney shoots him down in the street for a horse, $150 cash, and two Californian gold pieces. Ross's unusually mature and single-minded fourteen-year-old daughter Mattie travels to claim his body, and finds that the authorities are doing nothing to find Chaney. Then she hears of Rooster - a man, she's told, who has grit - and convinces him to join her in a quest into dark, dangerous Indian territory to hunt Chaney down…
Like Hermione, Courtney comes from a non-magical background and discovers her own magical heritage. Her stubborn curiosity propels her into a fantastical world operating under our own. She also has a sense of justice and would deffo have allied with Hermione in S.P.E.W. Unlike Hermione, Courtney isn’t studious or diligent. She’s a bit of a slacker and a grump. What I love about this series is the prickly heroine and the treatment of the fantastical world. Like the Wizarding World, the fantastical worldbuilding in this series is built on familiar Western fantasy creatures and tropes. What’s special about it is the stylish Goth-chic interpretation through the author/artist’s artwork and the examination of the ethical conundrums latent in fantasy since fantasy is often about power.
Get the first volume of this critically acclaimed series for only $10 as part of Oni's Square One program!
Courtney Crumrin grumbles about everything, but now she's really got something to grumble over. Having run out of credit cards, her parents are moving to the wealthy suburb of Hillsborough, to live rent-free with their creepy old uncle Aloysius. Courtney is now an outcast among her rich, snobby classmates. And if that weren't bad enough, the musty, decrepit old mansion that she now calls home is occupied by stranger creatures than just her parents or Uncle Aloysius.
The constellation we know as Taurus goes all the way back to cave paintings of aurochs at Lascaux. This book traces the story of the bull in the sky, a journey through the history of what has become known as the sacred bull.
Each of the sections is written from the perspective of the mythical Taurus, from the beginning at Lascaux to Mesopotamia, Ancient Egypt, and elsewhere. This is not just a history of the bull but also a view of ourselves through the eyes of the bull, illustrating our pre-literate use of myth, how the advent of writing and the urban revolution changed our view of ourselves, and how even bullfighting in Spain is a variation on the ancient sacrifice of the sacred bull.
The constellation we know as Taurus goes all the way back to cave paintings of aurochs at Lascaux. In I Am Taurus, author Stephen Palmer traces the story of the bull in the sky, starting from that point 19,000 years ago - a journey through the history of what has become known as the sacred bull. Each of the eleven sections is written from the perspective of the mythical Taurus, from the beginning at Lascaux to Mesopotamia, Ancient Egypt, Greece, Spain and elsewhere. This is not just a history of the bull but also an attempt to see ourselves through…
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