Top Ten Tuesday: Books on My Winter 2024-2025 To-Read List

Today’s list includes a host of middle grade titles all being released at the beginning of 2025. With lots of great authors behind these books, I can’t wait to get my hands on them! And with only a few more weeks to the new year, do you have the first book of 2025 picked out yet? Or do you just keep reading through the holidays without too much of a plan?

I’ve done both – chosen the first book of the new year and have also not paid to close attention to it. And, as for right now, I’m probably not going to decide on a specific title. I tend to be a “what’s available” type of reader, selecting my next book based on what I can pick up from work on any given day whether it’s a phsyical book or digital copy.

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Books on My Winter 2024-2025 To-Read List

Away by Megan E. Freeman

Publication Date: February 11, 2025

After an imminent yet unnamed danger forces people across Colorado to leave their homes, a group of kids including an aspiring filmmaker and a budding journalist find themselves in the same evacuation camp. As they cope with the aftermath of having their world upended, they grow curious about the mysterious threat.

And as they begin to investigate, they start to discover that there’s less truth and more cover-up to what they’re being told. Can they get to the root of the conspiracy, expose the bad actors, and bring an end to the upheaval before it’s too late?

Cincinnati Lee, Curse Breaker by Heidi Heilig

Publication Date: March 25, 2025

Cincinnati Lee’s great great (great?) grandfather is famous. His adventures discovering ancient artifacts have been made into movies, and his work is widely respected by museums across the world. The thing is, in that line of work, you’re bound to get cursed. And that leaves your great great (great?) granddaughter to break the curse by returning the artifacts you “preserved.”

Cincinnati’s own adventure begins in the Cosmopolitan Museum in New York City, where her single mom works and Cincinnati has grown up. Soon she learns about the ancient Spear of Destiny—and its potential to right all the wrongs in her family’s past. Or bring about the end of the world. It all depends on whose hands it falls into. Cincinnati must beat two relic hunters to the spear, and her quest will take her to surprising locations throughout the city and even across the Atlantic Ocean. Along the way, she’ll make a new friend (which is not the easiest thing to do), make some enemies (surprisingly easy to do), and ultimately learn what makes the world worth saving.

A Day at the Beach by Gary D. Schmidt and Ron Koertge

Publication Date: April 1, 2024

Here’s what’s so cool about the beach. Kids are everywhere! Kids you know, kids you want to know. Wandering from one blanket to another, from one family to another. Somebody’s mom reads a fat summer novel. Somebody’s dad snores with an iPad on his chest. Babies cry. Girls laugh. Frisbee players whoop! Kites in the perfect blue sky.

Some kids bodysurf. Some don’t even like the water. They build sand cities for their friends and sand jails for the grown-ups, and when the tide comes in everything gets washed away.

There’s the other world, where all kids hear is tomorrow, next week, next year. And then there’s the beach, where everything is right now!

Why can’t every day be a day at the beach?

The Green Kingdom by Cornelia Funke and Tammi Hartung

Publication Date: April 1, 2025

All right, she had to admit it: it really was an adventure to be in a new place. A different Caspia emerged here. A Brooklyn-Caspia, just like the Brooklyn-dandelion. Twelve-year-old Caspia hates big cities, especially New York. So, she isn’t thrilled by the news that her parents are taking her to Brooklyn for the whole summer.

But everything changes when Caspia discovers a bundle of letters, written by a blind girl many years ago, and hidden in an old chest of drawers. Each letter contains a ‘green’ riddle, with clues leading to a different plant.

Caspia sets out to solve the riddles and, as she does, she meets friends she could never have imagined and finds, to her surprise, that sometimes you can put down roots where you least expect it.

One Wrong Step by Jennifer A. Nielsen

Publication Date: March 4, 2025

For a climber, letting go means certain death. For Atlas, it means something even worse. But he’ll have to learn how to let go and look up if he ever wants to see the top…

Twelve-year-old Atlas Wade has been trying to forget the memory of his mother by climbing mountains ever since she died when he was nine years old. When his father signs them up for an expedition group hoping to be the first to ever summit the unconquerable Mount Everest, Atlas can’t wait for the chance to prove himself to his father, and maybe finally he can leave his mother behind him on the mountain.

But this time, Atlas is the one left behind, as well as a young American girl named Maddie and their sturdy yet injured Sherpa, Chodak. When news breaks out that war has returned to Europe, and that Nazis are attempting their own summit dangerously nearby, Atlas and Maddie plead with the expedition to come back down.

Their warnings come too late. Atlas looks up that same morning to see an avalanche and when they receive no word from the group, Maddie and Chodak join Atlas as he begins a dangerous journey up the mountain in the hopes of finding survivors.

Atlas, Maddie, and Chodak will have to rely not just on their own wits for survival, but on each other as well, especially as sickness, bad weather, and their fears of a Nazi spy watching them puts their mission — and lives — at risk in the brutal terrain. And Atlas will have to learn how to let go if he wants any chance of finding his father and fixing the rift between them caused by his mother’s death, before it’s too late.

Safe Harbor by Padma Venkatraman

Publication Date: January 21, 2025

When Geetha and her mom move from India to Rhode Island after her parents’ divorce, they leave everything Geetha loves behind—her family, her friends, her dog, and all that’s familiar. As if that’s not hard enough, Geetha is bullied at her new school for her clothes, her food, and her English (who knew so many English words could be spelled or pronounced differently in the US—or just be altogether different!). She finds some solace in playing her flute and writing poetry, and even more when she meets Miguel, a kid with whom she has a lot in common, and the two of them help rescue an injured harp seal stranded on the beach.

But Geetha can feel her anger building over lots of things—careless people who pollute the sea and hurt animals, and her mom for making her move. She’s never been so sad and angry. She can see a lot of her fears mirrored in the injured seal when she visits it at the Marine Mammal Rehabilitation Center, and this broadens her understanding of survival skills. And when she and Miguel start a beach-clean-up venture, she’s surprised to find how many kind kids are out there. Geetha is torn as the time comes to let the seal go, knowing she’ll miss him, but wanting the best for him. She’s learning to live with mixed feelings and accept that while there will always be rough waters, there are plenty of safe harbors too.

Same Page by Elly Swartz

Publication Date: January 14, 2025

Bess Stein is more than ready to be 6th grade class president. She’s got tons of ideas—including a book vending machine—and her new friend June is beside her as vice-president. Together, they’re unstoppable.

But when the books the girls want included in the vending machine come under fire, Bess is stunned. How can one person believe they have the right to decide what other people can read? It turns out that June’s mom is leading the fight, and now everything’s a mess.

Bess misses June—but she wants to make sure kids who might like these books get the chance to read them, even if it means she and June can’t be friends. With such different opinions, will they ever be on the same page?

The Strongest Heart by Saadia Faruqi

Publication Date: March 4, 2025

Mo is used to his father’s fits of rage. When Abbu’s moods shake the house, Mo is safe inside his head, with his cherished folktales: The best way to respond is not to engage. Apparently, his mama knows that too—which is why she took a job on the other side of the world, leaving Mo alone with Abbu.

With Mama gone, the two move to Texas to live with Mo’s aunt and cousin, Rayyan. The two boys could not be more different. Rayyan is achievement-driven and factual; Mo is a “bad kid.” Still, there is a lot to like about living in Texas. Sundays at the mosque are better than he’d expected. And Rayyan and his aunt become a real family to Mo.

But even in a warm home and school where he begins to see a future for himself, Mo knows that the monster within his father can break out and destroy their fragile peace at any moment…

Very Bad at Math by Hope Larson

Publication Date: January 21, 2025

Verity “Very” Nelson can do it all.

She’s student body president, debate club whiz, and first chair clarinetist. You could say she’s pretty much the best at everything…Well, almost everything. Everything except math.

And it’s not like she doesn’t try. Math just doesn’t make sense in her brain. But it better start soon, or else she can kiss her presidency—and her campaign promises—goodbye. Soon Verity finds herself enrolled in a remedial math class where, despite her best efforts, failure persists. All seems lost until a teacher helps her discover the truth: Verity has dyscalculia, a learning disability that causes her to mix up numbers.

Armed with a new perspective, can Verity pass math, keep her presidency, and make good on her word to the student body she loves so much? Or will her presidency—and perfect reputation—all come crashing down?

What Fell From the Sky by Adrianna Cuevas

Publication Date: February 11, 2025

All Pineda Matlage wants is to get through the school year and maybe pull an epic prank or two with his friends Junior, Ernesto, and Patsy. But class is disrupted when a slew of American soldiers descends upon their rural Texan town of Soledad. They’ll be carrying out a training exercise and taking over everything, from Pineda’s school to the local government.

But Pineda knows why they’re really here. For days he’s hidden the strange creature who fell from the sky in his parents’ barn. He promised her he’d find her family and help them return home. But with soldiers now on every street corner and armed checkpoints across every road, reuniting his new friend with her missing parents seems an impossible task. Especially when they realize that the army’s presence is really a coverup for capturing his alien friends―being observed in a laboratory by the US government for reasons of their own.

Enlisting the help of his friends, a Black soldier adjusting to a newly integrated army, and townspeople tired of the military’s destructive presence, Pineda and all of Soledad will embark on an adventure none of them could have ever expected.

Top Ten Tuesday was created by The Broke and the Bookish in June of 2010 and was moved to That Artsy Reader Girl in January of 2018. It was born of a love of lists, a love of books, and a desire to bring bookish friends together.