Here are 100 books that Nikki on the Line fans have personally recommended if you like
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Despite playing precisely one year of competitive basketball myself, as a gangly sixth grader in the 1990s forced to play without her (desperately needed) glasses and capable of only granny-style free throws, I fell in love with the sport later in life as a superfan of my local college basketball team, the University of Cincinnati Bearcats. I’m forever interested in players as human beings, and the way forces from their off-court life affect the game and vice versa.
Body image issues affect so many of us, and it can feel particularly acute in the middle school years, when our bodies are undergoing so much change. Though it’s been decades, I palpably remember how strange my growth spurt felt from the inside and how it changed my confidence.
In Alyson Gerber’s excellent book, Sarah is used to excelling on the basketball court, but when the shots stop falling, she’s quick to blame her changing physique and takes matters into her own hands to rectify things by drastically altering her eating habits.
Gerber handles this material with empathy and compassion, never talking down to the reader or getting preachy. Whatever your gender (body image issues are hardly limited to girls), there’s so much to relate to in this story.
From beloved author Alyson Gerber comes another realistic contemporary novel perfect for fans of Judy Blume.
Sarah loves basketball more than anything. Crushing it on the court makes her feel like she matters. And it's the only thing that helps her ignore how much it hurts when her mom forgets to feed her. But lately Sarah can't even play basketball right. She's slower now and missing shots she should be able to make. Her body doesn't feel like it's her own anymore. She's worried that changing herself back to how she used to be is the only way she can…
Despite playing precisely one year of competitive basketball myself, as a gangly sixth grader in the 1990s forced to play without her (desperately needed) glasses and capable of only granny-style free throws, I fell in love with the sport later in life as a superfan of my local college basketball team, the University of Cincinnati Bearcats. I’m forever interested in players as human beings, and the way forces from their off-court life affect the game and vice versa.
Every baller has a player they absolutely idolize, whether it’s someone who makes the Sportscenter highlight reels on the regular or the best dunker at their local basketball court. For Shot Clock’s Tony, it’s Dante, who took his AAU team to the championships twice. But when Dante is killed by a police officer, everything changes.
This book brings you all the exciting game action you’d expect from a book with that title and cover, but it’s also a story about grief and loss (a sweet spot for me, always) and the intersection of racial justice and sports. I can’t wait for the sequel coming out in fall 2024.
Former NBA All-Star Caron Butler and acclaimed author Justin A. Reynolds tip off the first book in a new middle grade series about a young boy trying to make his mark on an AAU basketball team coached by a former NBA star in his hometown. Perfect for fans of The Crossover and the Track series. A Junior Library Guild Selection!
Tony loves basketball. But the game changed recently when his best friend, Dante, a hoops phenom, was killed by a police officer. Tony hopes he can carry on Dante’s legacy by making the Sabres, the AAU basketball team Dante took…
Despite playing precisely one year of competitive basketball myself, as a gangly sixth grader in the 1990s forced to play without her (desperately needed) glasses and capable of only granny-style free throws, I fell in love with the sport later in life as a superfan of my local college basketball team, the University of Cincinnati Bearcats. I’m forever interested in players as human beings, and the way forces from their off-court life affect the game and vice versa.
A graphic novel about girls’ basketball after the passing of Title IX? Sign me up!
This book takes readers into the early 1970s as Judy, Cindy, and Lisa join their school’s first-ever girls’ basketball team. Tavares is best known for his beautiful picture books, but here he crafts a completely winning story that’s as much about basketball as it is a slice of life in the seventies. Current middle schoolers will be blown away by the differences between then and now, both on and off the court.
I gobbled this book up in less than an hour, but I keep coming back to it again and again because there’s just that much to appreciate with the combination of the visual elements and the text.
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A work of fiction inspired by a true story, Matt Tavares’s debut graphic novel dramatizes the historic struggle for gender equality in high school sports.
It is 1975 in Indiana, and the Wilkins Regional High School girls’ basketball team is in their rookie season. Despite being undefeated, they practice at night in the elementary school and play to empty bleachers. Unlike the boys’ team, the Lady Bears have no buses to deliver them to away games and no uniforms, much less a laundry service. They make their own uniforms out of T-shirts and electrical…
Eleven-year-old Sierra just wants a normal life. After her military mother returns from the war overseas, the two hop from home to homelessness while Sierra tries to help her mom through the throes of PTSD.
Despite playing precisely one year of competitive basketball myself, as a gangly sixth grader in the 1990s forced to play without her (desperately needed) glasses and capable of only granny-style free throws, I fell in love with the sport later in life as a superfan of my local college basketball team, the University of Cincinnati Bearcats. I’m forever interested in players as human beings, and the way forces from their off-court life affect the game and vice versa.
I’m mixing it up here a little with a non-fiction title that I think a lot of middle school fans of the game of basketball would learn a TON from. Maraniss, the award-winning and best-selling author of Strong Inside, brings an incredible amount of research and detail to life in this story of the first Olympic women’s basketball team.
My mind was truly blown reading about how much the earliest women’s basketball players had to overcome to compete, from the paternalist physicians who couldn’t have known less about a woman’s athletic capacity if they tried to practical, financial considerations and beyond.
These women are my heroes, and I’m grateful to Maraniss for honoring their legacies with this book.
From the New York Times bestselling author of Strong Inside comes the inspirational true story of the birth of women’s Olympic basketball at the 1976 Summer Games and the ragtag team that put US women’s basketball on the map. Perfect for fans of Steve Sheinkin and Daniel James Brown.
A League of Their Own meets Miracle in the inspirational true story of the first US Women’s Olympic Basketball team and their unlikely rise to the top.
Twenty years before women’s soccer became an Olympic sport and two decades before the formation of the WNBA, the ’76 US women’s basketball team…
I am a non-binary author and artist who, like so many of the characters in the books I have recommended, struggled with navigating their sexual identity while growing up. I believe this is an incredibly common experience amongst youth that deserves to be represented more in modern media, as well as mental health and disability representation. As for myself, I'm a big fantasy nerd who loves cats, collecting plushies, and drawing my heart out.
This book was recommended to me by my mentor, so it was one of the first queer graphic novels I ever got to experience. I love this book because it goes through so many of the hardships of being openly yourself. It’s nostalgic, it’s relatable, and it’s incredibly heartfelt.
While the main focus of Kiss Number 8 is exploring queer identity in young adulthood, my favorite part of this book is the relationship the main character has with her father and how that relationship struggles, changes, and grows over the course of the book.
Mads is pretty happy with her life. She goes to church with her family, and minor league baseball games with her dad. She goofs off with her best friend Cat, and has thus far managed to avoid getting kissed by Adam, the boy next door. It's everything she hoped high school would be - until all of a sudden, it's not.
Her dad is hiding something big - so big it could tear her family apart. And that's just the beginning of her problems: Mads is starting to figure out that she doesn't want to kiss Adam - because the…
As a doctor, writer, and mother of middle schoolers, I was ready to scintillate the sixth-graders when I volunteered for the chicken wing dissection class, demonstrating the exciting connection between muscles, tendons, and bones. I opened and closed the wing, placed it in their hands, and showed them the thin strips of tissue coordinating all the action. Did I see fascination? Excitement? Feigned interest of any sort? Sadly, no. They were much more enthusiastic about a different topic I volunteered for. Mythology. Greek gods. Beasts with multiple heads. They knew everything, and I knew books like Rick Riordan’s The Lightning Thief series were the reason. Books can entertain and educate.
Another great series from Rick Riordan. Set somewhat in the real world, a brother and a sister who don’t look alike discover they are descended from long line of a family of both Egyptian pharaohs and magicians. They have special talents to battle gods from Egyptian mythology and must save their father and the world.
Again, so much history and mythology packed into an exciting adventure story. Our whole family loved it.
The Red Pyramid: the first book in Rick Riordan's The Kane Chronicles.
Percy Jackson fought Greek Gods. Now the Gods of Egypt are waking in the modern world...
'I GUESS IT STARTED THE NIGHT OUR DAD BLEW UP THE BRITISH MUSEUM . . .'
CARTER AND SADIE KANE'S dad is a brilliant Egyptologist with a secret plan that goes horribly wrong. An explosion shatters the ancient Rosetta stone and unleashes Set, the evil god of chaos . . .
Set imprisons Dr Kane in a golden coffin and Carter and Sadie must run for their lives. To save their dad,…
The Adventures of Lucky and Mr. Pickle
By
MJ Howson,
The Stormy Night is the first in a series of nine children's books for ages 8-12. The stories follow two dogs–a senior, disabled dog and a newly adopted puppy–as they learn to become friends and family.
The Adventures of Lucky and Mr. Pickle series are chapter books, not picture books.…
I first started lying as a child and was fascinated to discover that the art of deception could turn into full-time employment as either a politician or an author (I choose the one with moderately better hours and substantially worse pay). As someone who crafts elaborate lies for the purposes of entertainment, I remain fascinated by people who lie for nefarious ends, something I swear I’d never do. (Except for the time I snuck into a music festival by pretending to be one of the catering staff, earning me the dubious distinction of being one of very few people to ever appear in a Metallica moshpit wearing a waiter’s uniform.)
We all have secrets. If you read that sentence and thought “not me!” then that’s likely because you’ve repressed something so dark and dangerous that your psyche let you unleash it from the depths of your unconscious into your working memory.
This book looks at the myriad ways that holding onto secrets can affect our relationships and day-to-day lives through an engaging blend of personal, creative, and scientific perspectives.
Peppered with both fun tidbits of information (the average person has thirteen secrets), as well as complex, deeper insights into the science of secrets, I found this fascinating both as a general reader and more specifically as someone who writes characters who are burdened with secrets and have to construct a false reality around them.
'If you've ever wondered why we keep secrets and what motivates us to spill them, look no further' Adam Grant, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Think Again
An eye-opening look at why we keep the secrets we keep, how to better understand and cope with them, and when (and how) we should bring them to light.
Think of a secret that you're keeping from others. It shouldn't take long. Psychologist Michael Slepian finds that, on average, we are keeping as many as thirteen secrets at any given time. His research, involving more than 50,000 participants from around the…
All my books (I hope!) sweep the reader into another world – it’s one of my favourite themes in the books I love to read, as well as write. When I was about seven, I first read some of the books which would shape my life, including Elidor by Alan Garner and A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine l’Engle, which brought me right out of my own life and into worlds as varied as the frightening interstellar realm of Camazotz and the battlefields of Elidor. I’ve been trying to capture that sense of ‘being swept away’ in my own work ever since.
Bell’s Uncommoners series is set in a richly-imagined magical world where everyday objects have extraordinary powers – and when darkness closes in, Seb and Ivy Sparrow must race to uncover an Uncommon mystery before it’s too late. Featuring a talking bicycle bell, police officers armed with toilet brushes, and the incredible city of Londinium, these books will fling you straight into a thrilling adventure.
Welcome to a world where nothing is quite as it seems . . .
Dive head first into the world of Lundinor in this magical adventure story for anyone with a Hogwarts-shaped hole in their life.
When their grandmother Sylvie is rushed to hospital, Ivy Sparrow and her annoying big brother Seb cannot imagine what adventure lies in store. Returning to Sylvie's house, they find it has been ransacked by unknown intruders - before a mysterious feather scratches an ominous message onto the kitchen wall. A very strange policeman turns up on the scene, determined to apprehend them . .…
As a mystery author, I’ve long been drawn to stories about missing persons, particularly novels featuring missing mothers. I suspect the special appeal of books about missing moms is because my own mother was M-I-A during my childhood. Whereas my older sisters lost our mother to mental illness at the tender ages of four and seven, in some ways, I was fortunate because I was an infant when our mom was institutionalized and, thus, had never fully bonded with her. And yet, the longing for my mother was ever-present. She left behind a large empty space in our family.
Having grown up in a waterfront community, I couldn’t resist this atmospheric thriller featuring a young woman drawn back to a small Southern town built around a lake. Years ago, her mother had abandoned her, leaving her with her stepfather. Or so she’s always been told.
But as she peels away family secrets and lies, she discovers that her mother never intended to leave her, and she has no idea who hurt her mother or who may be trying to silence her. The plot twists and sense of ever-present dread kept me reading long into the night!
Her father was the town detective. Her mother its most notorious criminal. Now the secrets of Mirror Lake are coming to the surface…and changing everything. "[A] stunning psychological thriller from one of the most insightful writers around” (CrimeReads), don’t miss the latest from Megan Miranda, the instant New York Times bestselling author of All the Missing Girls, The Last to Vanish, and The Only Survivors.
“Miranda…exposes revelation after twisty revelation…Small-town claustrophobia and intimacies alike propel this twist-filled psychological thriller” (Kirkus Reviews, starred review).
Eleven-year-old Mira wishes everything could go back to the way it was. Before she changed schools and had to quit gymnastics. Especially before Papa died. Now she spends her days cooking and cleaning for her stepsisters and Val—who she still won’t call mom and still won’t forgive for the terrible…
As a writer my storylines almost always develop out of the characters and settings I first create. As a reader, I enjoy a book as much (sometimes more!) for the characters and setting in it as I do for the plot itself. My favorite reads have always featured a quirky or bigger-than-life character and a setting that in some instances may seem ordinary but the circumstances of how the character ended up there are far from that. I love the middle-grade novels on my list because the main characters are brave and resourceful and each has an unusual and intriguing path that has led them to where their story takes place.
I love characters that make me feel like I’m in the room with them and both Louisiana and her Granny check that box. Quirky personalities abound in this sweet but often sad story about a girl who hits the road with her eccentric caretaker grandmother in the middle of a starry night. Granny insists that the time has come to leave Florida and confront the curse that hangs over their heads. That means leaving everything familiar and dear to Louisiana far behind: Her friends, her cat, her home. The two end up in a small town in Georgia and as Louisiana’s grandmother’s world gets smaller, Louisiana is left to her own devices in a world that seems too big to handle.
Follow-up to the New York Times Bestselling Raymie Nightingale, from an internationally revered author, twice winner of the Newbery Medal.
When Louisiana Elefante's granny wakes her up in the middle of the night to tell her that the day of reckoning has arrived and they have to leave home immediately, Louisiana isn't overly worried. After all, Granny has many middle-of-the-night ideas. But this time, things are different. This time, Granny intends for them never to return. Separated from best friends Raymie and Beverly, Louisiana struggles to oppose the winds of fate (and Granny) and find a way home. But as…
