2023 Summer Reading Guide: Books for the Whole Family

Summer is the best time for reading aloud. And when it comes to bedtime reading, no school wakeup means you can indulge requests for “just one more chapter.”

Glitch by Laura Martin

This quick moving time travel novel has a lot of fun history moments woven in. Glitchers are people who travel through time to preserve important historical events. When two enemy Glitchers in-training learn some information that threatens them and everyone they know, will they be able to put their hostility aside and save the future?

Fortunately the Milk by Neil Gaiman

This odd and hilarious book is a quick read and one that everyone in the family will love (don’t skip the audio version – it’s read by the author, only an hour long, and laugh-out-loud funny.. A father is abducted by aliens while picking up milk for his children’s cereal and when he returns, he tells his children about the wild adventures through time and space he had on his little errand.

The One and Only Ivan by Katherine Applegate

Shipwreck at the Bottom of the World by Jennifer Armstrong

My kids and I were hooked on this incredible true story of Ernest Shackleton. He and his 27 men got trapped in ice as they attempted to cross Antarctica back in the early 1900s and then spent five months camping on ice floes, finally navigating 800 miles of open ocean in a tiny boat to find a rescue ship. Miraculously every single one of them survived against all odds. There are lots of original photos in this book and it’s not very long – we blazed through it in less than two weeks!