Young Readers

Peeps Scott Westerfeld If You Decide to Go to the Moon Faith McNulty, ill. by Steven Kellogg Scholastic / ages 4-8 If you decide to go to the moon, and you're a second-grader or younger, this is your travel guide. The familiarity of Steven Kellogg's illustrating style matches the lift-off world, which appears to be just on the other side of a green field nearby to anywhere and anyone. And for astronauts young enough to want games and books and peanut butter, that familiarity is comforting.

Klondike Gold Alice Provensen Simon & Schuster. Ages 7-10. There was more than one gold rush in 19th century North America, and this book is written as the record of one Bill Howell, who takes off from Boston in 1896 to head for the Yukon River. The Canadian government required anyone who was crossing into the Northwest Territories to bring a year's supply of food, medicine, clothing and tools. Bring and carry. Feel the heft of it: 800 pounds of flour and 300 pounds of bacon, just for starters.

Clarice Bean Spells Trouble Lauren Child Candlewick / Ages 9-12 Clarice isn't happy that her teacher has organized a spelling bee. "Another thing that is difficult to explain is why YOU isn't spelled U and why WHY isn't spelled Y." Always the contrarian, Clarice is sure that truly valuable knowledge is knowing every episode of "Ruby Redfort," a secret agent adventure show, as well as perceiving what makes her classmate, Karl Wrenbury, tick. "He has just got this zingy thing in him. ... And sometimes he lets the guinea pigs out on purpose."

The Penderwicks: A Summer Tale of Four Sisters, Two Rabbits, and a Very Interesting Boy By Jeanne Birdsall. Alfred A. Knopf. Ages 8-12 years. Like the Berkshires cottage that the Penderwick family has rented for August, this story is a light-filled surprise. Their widowed father is a botanist, and the girls range from 13-year-old Rosalind, the practical one, to shy little Batty, 4, who insists on wearing butterfly wings. The cottage is part of a large estate, Arundel, owned by an icy-hearted grande dame, her put-upon son, Peter, and a gardening staff considerably hotter than old Ben Weatherstaff of Frances Hodgson Burnett's The Secret Garden.

Blood Red Horse By K.M. Grant. Walker. Ages 11-15 years. Imagine the complexity of human events that fit under the label of "the Crusades," as seen by young English Christians and by a young Muslim boy. Covering the years 1185 to 1193, and from England to Jerusalem, K.M. Grant follows the lives of four young people. Will and Gavin, of Hartslove Castle in northern England, ride to follow their father in King Richard's service. Eleanor, their father's ward and their friend, stays home at Hartslove.

The Witch's Boy By Michael Gruber. HarperTempest. $16.99. Ages 10-14. The cover is a bit off-putting, showing a golden mask covering a hairy creature's face. What's inside is a compelling and quite new journey through the narrative landscape of fairy tales. A witch finds an abandoned baby in the forest and, quite against character, decides to keep it. Despite the wise advice of her cat, Falance, she persists, without any clue about how to raise a child. She names the baby Lump, hires a bear to nurse it and calls up an imprisoned genie to design the nursery.

Maximum Ride: The Angel Experiment by James Patterson. Little Brown. $16.99. Ages 11-14 years. Thriller writer James Patterson takes a story told largely from the point of view of adults, in his earlier When the Wind Blows and The Lake House, and centers the narration on the five children called "the flock." They're the product of experimentation on human and avian DNA. Think wings, big wings. When the novel begins, they're living alone and apart, and Max, short for Maximum Ride and the oldest, is their leader, mother, tactical planner and sometimes sulky teenage girl as well.

The Sphere of Secrets By Catherine Fisher. Greenwillow. $16.99. Ages 11-14 years. Starting with the second book of this series would be difficult. If you have, however, read The Oracle Betrayed (or after you have), Book 2 continues the fast turns of plot and character. It combines some aspects of the mythologies of ancient Greece and Egypt, with an Oracle, a Speaker for the oracle, and a child, Archon, ruling over a kingdom of political intrigue and mercantile power. Mirany, a young attendant to the Speaker, and the one through whom the divinity is actually speaking, seeks an end to the intrigue.

Freedom on the Menu: The Greensboro Sit-Ins By Carole Boston Weatherford, paintings by Jerome Lagarrigue. Dial. $16.99. Ages 8-11 years. Greensboro, N.C., 1960. The event grown-ups remember -- a lunch-counter sit-in at Woolworth's -- comes slowly into view, as we watch the way the world is from one little girl's perspective. When she goes downtown to shop with her mother, "All over town, signs told Mama and me where we could and couldn't go." Jerome Lagarrigue's paintings catch all the shadows that darken this child's life.

Poles Apart: Why Penguins and Polar Bears Will Never Be Neighbors By Elaine Scott. Viking, $17.99. Ages 9-14 years. One might expect the histories of exploration and of animal populations here, but what Elaine Scott does so well is convey the basic differences between the Arctic and the Antarctic themselves. Why is the Arctic not a continent, when Antarctica is? Because the Arctic "is a frozen sea, surrounded by the frozen edges of many different lands. ... Antarctica ... is a continent -- a mass of land surrounded by icy seas."