These are here so you can choose knowingly, not to discourage the reading.

• Bully on the Bus: this book is about being bullied and it does not look away. DJ pinches and threatens Leroy, and he is frightened of getting on the bus. Grown-ups find out and deal with it before the end. A child who is being picked on right now may recognise the middle of this book.
• Too Many Friends: nothing needs a warning, but the friendship trouble is real and the book names it. Tahnee is left out at her own party, friends fall out with her and with each other, and Lucy has nobody for a long stretch.
• Enter the Roo: an old lady slips over, a gang takes over a train and threatens the passengers, a meteor hits the train, and the children end up in hospital. It is drawn as comedy and nobody is badly hurt, but there is shouting, a crash and some slapstick violence.
• Kumiko and the Dragon: Kumiko spends the first part of the book frightened of being eaten, and the book takes that fear seriously before it takes it away. Nobody is eaten.
• Kumiko and the Shadow Catchers: the Shadow Catchers are genuinely frightening, and the danger is to Kumiko’s family as well as to the dragons. Nothing is gory, but a child who worries may want company for the last chapters.
• My Dog is a Winner: Gretchen is lonely and left out, and near the end Eric is badly disappointed. Both are dealt with gently, and an adult talks each one through before the book finishes.
• My Dog Doesn’t Like Me: family arguments, and the family discussing whether the dog can stay, which children who have worried about a pet may feel strongly about.
• The Bad Guys: the humour is loud and a bit rude. Mr Snake swallows Mr Piranha more than once and it is drawn as a joke every time. Nobody is really hurt and nobody is really bad.
• The 13-Storey Treehouse: silly rather than frightening. There is a tank of man-eating sharks and a sea monster who pretends to be a mermaid, both drawn as jokes. The humour is loud and rude in places.
• School of Monsters, Billie B Brown and Anna Hibiscus: nothing in these needs a warning.

• All of these are available at any local library, and most Sydney libraries hold multiple copies of the Sally Rippin series.
• Borrowing first is sensible. If your child does not connect with a book in the first two chapters, change it. That is not failure, it is normal.
• Page counts are approximate and vary by edition. Check the actual copy before you plan the term.
• Every title on this list was checked against the NESA suggested texts list for English K-10. None of them appear on it, so your child will not be repeating something they study in class.

These are here so you can choose knowingly, not to discourage the reading.

• Charlotte’s Web: a piglet is about to be killed in chapter one, and Charlotte dies in chapter twenty-one. Neither is gory and both are handled gently, but the ending upsets a great many readers, adults included. It is worth being nearby for the last two chapters.
• The Elephant: a father’s depression, and the death of a mother before the book opens. For most of the story Olive’s dad is silent and withdrawn and is not really looking after her, and Olive carries that. The ending is hopeful and does not pretend the illness has been cured.
• Aster’s Good, Right Things: anxiety and depression, named plainly rather than hinted at. Aster’s mother has left the family and does not come back, and Aster has decided it was her fault. If your child has anxiety, or if a parent has left your family, read the first chapters alongside them.
• My Brother Ben: the boys’ father has left the family and does not come back during the story, and none of that is tidied up quickly. A dead bird is found on the road in the opening pages and is handled and buried.
• The Lost Island: Theo nearly drowns, and the moment he goes over the side is frightening. His mother’s death in a car accident is referred to but not described. Theo has real anxiety, including the breathing he uses to manage it.
• Solomon Macaroni: the cousins’ mother has died, and the spell they want needs something precious given up. For a stretch it looks as though that means one of the children. Nobody is harmed, and it is handled comically.
• The Grandest Bookshop in the World: the Cole children had a sister, Ruby, who died three years before the book opens, and Ruby Cole was a real child who really died. There are frightening scenes, including a room that floods, and the children lose their memories one by one.
• How to Bee: Peony is taken away by her mother, and there are frightening scenes involving her mother’s boyfriend, including violence. It is handled without detail, but a sensitive reader may find it upsetting.
• Nevermoor: the story opens with a child who has been told the date of her own death, and a family openly waiting for it. The book is warm and funny overall and nobody comes to harm, but the opening chapters are bleak.
• The Little Wave: grief, and a parent who hoards, so that one of the three children cannot let anybody see inside her house.
• How to Make the World Cup and Survive Grade Five: nothing frightening happens. It does deal with online criticism of real players, a parent who spends most of the story on his phone, and a best friendship that comes close to ending.
• Real Pigeons Fight Crime: nothing in this one needs a warning. The villains are silly and nobody is really hurt.

• Page counts are approximate and vary by edition. Check the actual copy before dividing the book into seven parts.
• All of these are held by Sydney public libraries. Borrowing first is sensible, and if your child is not engaged within two chapters, change the book.
• Content notes are here so you can choose knowingly, not to discourage the reading.
• Every title on this list was checked against the NESA suggested texts list for English K-10. None of them appear on it, so your child will not be repeating something they study in class.

These are here so you can choose knowingly, not to discourage the reading.

• Once: this is a Holocaust novel and it does not look away. There is a book burning, a burnt out house with a family dead inside it, people shot in the street, a Jewish ghetto, and a train taking children to a death camp. Children die. Nothing is described in gory detail and it all stays inside the voice of a boy who does not understand what he is seeing, but it is upsetting and it is meant to be. If your child has not met the Holocaust before, talk about it before they start, not at the end.
• The Bone Sparrow: set in immigration detention and based on real Australian centres. Children are called by numbers rather than names. One guard is cruel and there is violence against children. Adults harm themselves in protest. There is a riot near the end and two characters die, one of them somebody the reader has come to love. The last quarter is distressing and is meant to be.
• New Kid: racist behaviour throughout, most of it small things done by friendly people, including assumptions about money and neighbourhood and teachers who call the Black students by each other’s names. There is no violence beyond a shove and no bad language. A child who has been on the receiving end of any of it will recognise it at once.
• Two Wolves: parents who have committed a crime, and a father who is frightening and uses his size to control people. There are guns in the story. In the second half two children are alone in the bush, genuinely hungry, and caught in a flood that could kill them. There is also a thread about Ben being teased for his weight. Recommended for eleven and up.
• Bindi: the middle of this book is a bushfire. There is drought, an evacuation, burnt Country and animals, and an injured child. It is honest rather than gory, but a child who has lived through a fire may find it close to home. Country, Elders, Ancestors and totems are treated seriously throughout.
• Little Bones: this book is about the death of a child. Nico died in a fall. It is never shown, but Bones returns to it in fragments and blames herself. She collects dead animals in detail, and a dead bird is brought back to a half life it does not want. The ending is genuinely hopeful, but a child who has lost somebody recently should not read this one alone.
• Meet Me at the Moon Tree: Carina’s father has died of cancer shortly before the book opens and the grief is close to the surface throughout. Her mother is emotionally absent for much of the story, her brother is angry, and there is a long sequence in which Carina is lost alone in a forest at night.
• The Dog Runner: survival after a collapse, and the danger is real. The children are hungry for most of the book, they cross a city that has broken down, and they meet armed and desperate people who mean them harm. Animals are killed and prepared for food and one of the children is badly hurt. The publisher recommends it for ages ten to fourteen.
• Front Desk: racism and poverty, and it does not soften either. Mia and her family are insulted and underpaid, a Black character is questioned by police because of his skin, and immigrant workers are threatened with losing their jobs and their home if they complain. There is no violence and no bad language.
• Leo & Ralph: a gentle book, but it is about loneliness and it does not rush it. Leo is left out at school for a long stretch, his family moves away from everything he knows, and his new friend Gus has a father who has died. The ending is the loss of Ralph, and children often feel it as a real bereavement.
• Summer of Shipwrecks: divorced parents, a father who has moved interstate, and a mother’s new partner who is on the holiday. The friendship comes apart with put-downs realistic enough that a child in the middle of something similar will recognise them. Late in the book Sid gets into trouble in the surf and has to be pulled out.
• Nevermoor: the opening chapters are about a child who has been told she will die, and a family already arranging things for afterwards. The coldness of the adults is real and it lasts some time. There are frightening scenes later involving a pursuing enemy and monstrous creatures.

• Page counts are approximate and vary by edition. Check the actual copy before dividing the book into seven parts.
• Content notes are here so you can choose knowingly. None of these books are unsuitable for this age; some are simply serious.
• Where a book is short, finishing early is the plan, not a problem. Your child starts a second book rather than reading more slowly.
• Every title on this list was checked against the NESA suggested texts list for English K-10. None of them appear on it, so your child will not be repeating something they study in class.

These are here so you can choose knowingly, not to discourage the reading.

• 47 Degrees: a bushfire the book does not soften, a house defended and then lost.
• Chinese Cinderella: a mother dead days after the birth, and cruelty from a father and a stepmother.
• Seven Little Australians: one of the seven children dies, and 1894 language for an Aboriginal man.
• Us Mob Walawurru: three accounts of first contact, including massacres, and a death.
• Mango Street: an assault, written in fragments. The Jammer: a mother dead before page one.
• Jane Doe: a town that turns on a child. A Single Shard: hunger. When Clouds Touch Us: a war.
• The Time Machine: one species farmed by another, a fight in the dark, a girl lost in a fire.
• Robert Runs: massacres and the Stolen Generations, and children taken from their families.
• Ruby’s Web: racism aimed at a Year 7 girl by people her own age, in class and on her phone.
• Tracks of the Missing: a murder, and stretches where the narrator thinks about ending his life.
• The Road to Winter: people held as property, and an insult the book uses on purpose.
• Ghost Bird: a missing twin, and dreams written to frighten. Becoming Aurora: a racist attack.
• The Sky So Heavy: cold, hunger and violence over food. The First Third: a grandmother dying.
• The Art of Taxidermy: a sister and a mother dead, and a girl who preserves dead animals.
• And Then There Were None: ten deaths, as puzzle. Laurinda: cruelty organised rather than loud.
• Follow the Rabbit-Proof Fence: children taken from their mothers, in the words of the 1930s.
• The Book Thief: the Holocaust, and most of the named characters die.
• Things Fall Apart: a boy killed by the man who raised him, twins left in the forest, a suicide.
• That Stubborn Seed of Hope: dementia, brain cancer, a school shooting, and a paralysed boy asking his brother to end his life.
• A Flash in the Dust: 14+, for a murder, a beating and references to sex work.
• Grace Notes: a violent household heard through a wall, and a year of lockdown as the weather of the book.
• Ballad for a Mad Girl: a dead parent, an old murder, and a girl’s fear of losing her mind.
• The Curious Incident: a dog killed with a garden fork, an arrest, and two years of lies.
• Where You Left Us and Henry Hamlet’s Heart: 14+, for depression, grief and coarse language.
• Frankenstein: a child strangled, a wife murdered. Never Let Me Go: sex discussed, never described.

• None of these titles appear on the NSW suggested texts list for English K to 10, or on the Stage 6 HSC prescriptions, so a finished journal can still be used later as a related text.
• Fifty-five of the seventy-two titles across all four lists are on the NSW Premier’s Reading Challenge list, so most local libraries hold them.
• A book you abandon is worth less than a lighter book you finish. If a hundred pages in your child is forcing it, change books and start a new journal.
• Content notes are listed above. They are there so nobody meets something difficult without warning, not to discourage the reading.