The best books for young readers that treat the supernatural with a clever sense of humor

A charming, thrilling story about a boy who lives in a graveyard and is raised by the spectral inhabitants there, this book initially seems to be a series of short stories about Nobody “Bod” Owens, but as it progresses it resonates with all the elements of an epic coming-of-age tale.

Witty British humor is peppered throughout; at one point, Bod is abducted by ghouls with names like “the Duke of Westminster,” “the 33rd President of the United States,” and “the writer Victor Hugo.”

Even when writing for middle-graders, Gaiman trusts his reader. There’s an art in not spelling everything out, in letting some questions go unanswered while dropping clues about the bigger picture, and Gaiman handles these choices like a master magician.

In this standalone addition to the Greenglass House series, Kate Milford has built a world of cozy and adventurous specificity.

It’s set mostly in the Liberty of Gammerbund, a walled municipality within the city of Nagspeake, a New England-ish coastal community populated by lots of former smugglers and pirates. Marzana and her friend Nialla learn that a girl from a neighboring school has been kidnapped, and they believe she sent a coded message using a book from a series they read obsessively. Marzana puts together a group of plucky kids (including one ghost) to solve the crime.

The setting is so lovingly created—with secret passages, architecture that modifies itself, and a magical, perpetually vacant “Glass Museum and Radioactive Teashop”—discerning readers will savor every minute of the mystery.

I loved Ellen Raskin’s much-lauded The Westing Game when I was nine years old, but I never got around to reading her 1974 middle-grade book Figgs & Phantoms, until recently. It’s a weird and whimsical story about family and grief with a magical realist touch.

Once a month, Mona Lisa Newton stands on the shoulders of her diminutive Uncle Florence Figg and dons a cloak to form the “Figg-Newton giant” so they can reach the rare not-for-sale books on the top shelf of a local bookstore. Their family has its own private mythology, including a version of heaven called Capri, and when a death occurs, Mona is determined to follow the clues and find it.

The text and illustrations manifest Raskin’s wry sense of humor, though some of the book’s mature themes might be too much for younger readers.

Twelve-year-old Freddie Ruiz believes he is the victim of a multi-generational family curse: whenever the pressure’s on, he’s likely to stumble, fall, or embarrass himself.

When he finds an old amulet in the garage, he unwittingly releases the ghost of his great-granduncle, and now the curse gets worse: Freddie has just seven days to reverse it if he wants to survive!

A winner of the Sid Fleischman Humor Award, this book also makes powerful references to Filipino history that help ground the fantasy events in the real world. It’s full of nice moments—I giggled when I saw that Chapter 13 was crossed out (“too unlucky!”) and replaced with Chapter 14—and there’s great warmth in the scenes between Freddie and his various family members.

In this graphic novel, Skye is a girl who would rather go with her mom to Rwanda than attend the summer camp her dad and stepmom have selected.

She’s determined not to have fun, even after (or especially after) she realizes she got on the wrong bus and is now at a camp for kids who reveal their “true” monster selves only when it’s safe to do so. But even when Skye is in way over her head, she never lets up on the snark.

Seagle’s dialogue keeps the lessons and serious stuff from sounding trite by framing it all in a steady stream of sarcasm and unexpected cultural references. Katzenstein’s art is filled with clever visual gags. (At one point, as Skye is faking tears, she’s holding an Oscar statuette.)