Exciting Books for 12 Year Old Boys

Four eighth-grade buddies and a new tag-along (whom they’re reluctant to include) discover a posh underground bunker in the wake of a hurricane in their small town. CJ, Evan, Jason, Mitchell, and Ricky quickly begin to hang out at the fort for different reasons. When things get intense for the boys, their safe space becomes at risk of exposure — but maybe that’s the only way they can stay safe? This is a realistic, suspense-filled, and heartwarming middle grade book about male friendships, history, and domestic violence. This title falls firmly in the realm of upper middle grade books and tackles difficult topics with grace, heart, and humor.

14-year-old Ahmed, forced to flee his home in Syria, is all alone in Brussels. He sneaks into the home of an expatriate family, where he finds shelter in their basement, feeding off their scraps and leftovers — until their son Max, who is around the same age, discovers him. Max and Ahmed form a heartwarming friendship, but keeping Ahmed safe without hiding him forever proves to be a suspense-filled endeavor. I couldn’t stop listening to this audiobook!

Friends and army brats Frank and Stanley live in Pearl Harbor, where they deal with the usual challenges of bullying and creating comic books. Until December 7th, 1941, when everything changes during the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. Will the boys survive the attack? How will the war change them and their friendship? Master of middle grade historical fiction, Alan Gratz, explores these in his latest novel. Heroes by Alan Gratz is an action-packed historical account about friendship and what it means to be a hero.

This dystopian YA book is at once chilling, thought-provoking, and compulsively readable. Set in a world where humans have conquered sickness, death, and all threat to life but now have appointed scythes to manage the population by gleaning humans periodically, this book follows two unwilling teens selected as apprentice scythes and their journey to attaining the position — or will they?

This YA novel is set in a dystopian world where every part of the earth is living with frigid temperatures except for Snowglobe–akin to The Capitol in the Hunger Games. While residents of all the other settlements work hard to generate resources for Snowglobe, its inhabitants live life under the camera lens, their lives fodder for reality TV and controlled by prestigious directors. When the star of one of the most popular shows dies, another girl outside Snowglobe who resembles her eerily is recruited to take her place, opening a can of worms about the unethical misuse of power in Snowglobe. Snowglobe is a twisty dystopian thriller for fans of The Hunger Games series that expertly combines elements of a thriller, dystopian fiction, and a mystery subplot while also meditating on privacy, ethics, and reality television.

When Calvin and his parents move from Chicago to the Levittown suburbs in Pennsylvania, he’s torn between leaving his culture and older brother behind in the black neighborhoods and assimilating into the all-white neighborhood. Meeting and falling for the new black girl in his town doesn’t help as he finds himself caught up in organizing to get more Black teens into his school. But things quickly turn dangerous for him and his friends as loyalties are tested across the board. The Color of the Lie is a propulsive YA coming-of-age historical fiction/thriller that examines racial passing in the 1950s.

Leo, Elsa, and Max are three friends in 1930s Vienna, Austria when Hitler’s reign begins to spread through Europe. Elsa’s family flees to Prague, Leo’s family remains in Austria, and Max and his Nazi-supporting father move to Munich. Told from all three perspectives, we follow the three teens in this heartwrenching story as they navigate these turbulent times and attempt to find a way back to each other.

What if Nazi Germany won WWII? That’s the chilling question this time-travel thriller explores. Two set of a friendship trio — on in 2023 and the other in 1944 — discover that they can communicate over a radio device present in both timelines. As the two groups figure out the differences in their timelines while trying to avoid making any changes to history, they discover that they’ve unwittingly made an enormously impactful change with shocking consequences. This is a middle grade book with a complex, cinematic plot and storytelling that wil appeal to younger and older middle schoolers alike.

It’s 2016, and Kareem is a Syrian-American football fan who really wants to play on his school middle school team but flunks his tryouts. The coach’s son Austin then tells Kareem that he can help him get in with the team if he helps him with his homework and some schoolwork, too. Kareem also generally wants to stay on Austin’s good side and so is afraid to stand up to him when Austin starts bullying a new Syrian immigrant whose family is friends with Kareem’s. Then things go haywire when Kareem’s mother has to go to Syria to get her parents to the US, and Trump’s order bans flights from Syria and some other predominantly Muslim countries. This is a powerful coming-of-age story about standing up for what is right — featuring a flawed protagonist who is sometimes hard to root for but always relatable.

It’s the year 1990, and Danilo’s family and neighborhood in Panama are still reeling from the US military invasion in 1989. His dad, who went to the US to earn more money for the family, has stopped writing them, and Danilo’s mother has to bear the brunt of caring for them. But things seem to look up when he gets the chance to play baseball in California. This excellently written middle grade book is packed with baseball action, Panamanian and US history, and plenty of heart!

14-year-old Quagmire Tiarello has always had to care for himself and his unstable mother. She has periods of spinning out and good seasons, but when we meet Quag, he’s in a mom-spin-out season. Cassie, the girl he likes, has also asked him to help out her friends at the Y on their stage project and just when Quag is settling into the group, his mom disappears–starting a rollercoaster chain of events. It took me a minute to get into the narration style and Quag’s obstinate, resistant-to-other-humans personality, but we do get to know him better, and readers will fall for him. I also loved that this book’s plot surprised me. I had no idea where we were going and how many wonderful characters we’d meet on Quag’s journey. An absolute heartwarming story for fans of The Tenth Mistake of Hank Hooperman.

When Sri Lankan 8th grader Ajay discovers that the chocolate bar he was pressured into stealing bears a million-dollar prize, he’s in an ethical dilemma. As he tries to find his way around the problem, Ajay finds himself entangled in a stressful but often hilarious web of lies between his strict immigrant parents, his precocious little sister, and the best friend he kind of likes, Mindy. I LOVED this thoughtful, surprising book and think it’s perfect for kids who enjoyed Stand Up, Yumi Chung, and other funny web-of-lies stories.

Lawrence has had the odds stacked against him for so long. He and his mom and little sister went from living in Charlotte, NC to finally moving in with his grandma while his father is incarcerated. To make matters worse, Lawrence keeps getting picked on at school and getting into fights which results in his getting expelled. While he’s home, he starts going to the town’s rec center where he learns to play chess. But a boy there keeps trying to get Lawrence to fight. Can he find a way to secure a win for once? Not an Easy Win is a heartwarming, realistic, and satisfying book about poverty, having an incarcerated parent, and finding belonging in chess. Ages 10+

I LOVED this hilarious middle grade debut! Stu Truly shines a light on that awkward transition between childhood to the pubescent years. In this story, meat-loving Stuart Truly’s first crush is the new girl in his class, who happens to be a vegetarian. He lies about also being vegetarian but then throughout the story, continues to get himself in hilarious circumstances as a result. Ultimately a sweet, funny story about the importance of being oneself and co-existing happily with others who make choices different from ours.

Theo’s dad is bundling him and his sister, Laura, into the car for a road trip to Big Bend National Park. Although nature doesn’t fit into any of the kids’ interests, they follow along for a chance to bond more since their mom died a few years ago. The kids notice, though, that their dad is suspiciously over-excited (and in turns) nervous about the trip, and everything makes sense when mid-way through, he introduces them to his new girlfriend, Lucrecia. Starring a witty and artistic young protagonist, this story intertwines humor with serious issues such as teens’ social media usage, confronting difficult emotions, and adjusting to a parent’s new relationship.

Sixth grade is off to a rocky start for Rex. His district moved most of his elementary school to another middle school, his best friend ditches him for the popular crew, and his blurry vision means he has to get clunky new glasses–the only kind his family can afford. This sweet graphic novel for fans of Telgemeier is an ode to middle school, family, and finding your people. Grades 5+

Graphic novelist Gene Luen Yang turns his pen to nonfiction in this powerful, inspiring narrative about his high school’s basketball team. Yang, who is a high school teacher, becomes inspired by the meteoric, potentially historic run of the men’s varsity basketball team. When he decides to interview them, he realizes that each player, as well as the team’s history itself, has a fascinating personal story that might even be bigger than just one basketball season.

Wei and Hung are two former best friends, now rivals, who both share a love for lion dancing. After a two-year hiatus and failure to find any other team sport where he belongs, Wei stumbles upon a lion dancing team, only to discover that Hung is a member. The two boys bicker even as Wei improves over time. Hung doesn’t want to be Wei’s tail anymore and instead wants to compete to be a lion head despite being better suited for the tail position. But over time, the boys come to figure out why Wei left and how to be better team members. There’s an air of mystery as we discover what happened with Wei’s dad, Wei stopping lion dancing, and who the team captain is. This is quite reminiscent of Duel, with plenty of information about how lion dancing works and what it means to be part of a team. Unique, beautiful graphics.

Weatherby is a new kid at the Boston School on a sailing scholarship and is immediately thrust into a world she knows nothing about. Old school phone booths, scrambled phone service at school, friends with kids who go to the country club.. and a boy who seems to hate her guts. It is told from two perspectives, Weatherby’s and Jack Hunt’s, a rich kid at the school who is also on the sailing team. When Jack, Weatherby, and their friends Pres, Iris, and Harper are contacted by what they think is the school’s famed secret society, they get sucked into a mission, only to unravel a deep secret about the Hunt family that involves Weatherby. This is an intriguing, fast-paced, and tightly-plotted middle-grade mystery for younger middle-school readers who are hungry for some thrilling, suspenseful mysteries but aren’t old enough for traditional YA.

This YA mystery by Ashley Elston was SO GOOD! Five private school teen boys go target shooting and one of them ends up dead, shot by his own gun with the fingerprints of all four friends on the gun and all the boys claiming they don’t know what happened. The story is told from two perspectives: that of the killer and that of a schoolmate in the public school they transfer to, who happened to be regularly texting the boy who was killed. The girl, Kate, also works at the DA’s office, where her mom works, and she helps the DA with his investigation since he has very poor eyesight. As things progress, nothing is as it seems both with Kate and with the boys in question and Kate gets more involved as the stakes get higher to find the killer. This was so much fun and really engaging on audio. There is one instance of F-word usage, but otherwise, this is pretty clean content-wise, and I would be fine handing it to a mature 7th-grader or an 8th-grader.