Hush
Donna Jo Napoli
Book summary
This historical tale centres on Melkorka’s efforts to survive captivity, learn about the people holding her and care for frightened children. Her silence becomes part of how others respond to her.
Explore
Type a book, author, topic, idea or reading experience.
Find a Book
Scan the ISBN, scan the front cover, or type what you know.
Combine filters when useful. Values show what a book addresses, not what it endorses.
Clear filtersRequests, popularity, awards and recommendations—not just age. A list is a starting point, not a suitability verdict.
Popular themes
Type to search the full theme index.
Fresh mix gives you a varied selection that stays steady while you browse, so returning from a guide does not reshuffle the page.
Donna Jo Napoli
This historical tale centres on Melkorka’s efforts to survive captivity, learn about the people holding her and care for frightened children. Her silence becomes part of how others respond to her.
Jeff Stone
This instalment centres on Hok’s search for a sense of self, alongside a dangerous rescue mission. Martial arts action and cooperation between the young monks are prominent.
Recommendations
Choose a route in, then open only the collection you want. 1 collections · 1 books.
Subjects, worlds and interests to browse into.
A curated collection of children’s books about setbacks, recovery, perseverance, courage and growth. Compare how each book handles difficulty before choosing what fits your child, timing and family values.
1 bookLinda Sue Park
A focused, dual-narrative historical novel about displacement, survival and access to water. Its language is spare, but the experiences include war, deaths and severe deprivation, balanced by perseverance and collective problem-solving.
Jen Alexander
A bleak survival story combines a hostile future setting with a game-like mystery: Claudia’s choices may be controlled, while an outsider offers a possible route to protection and escape.
Karen Harrington
A story about communication and family relationships, centred on a boy who uses facts to express himself and wants to connect with people around him.
A parent-child resource that explains autism-related differences and offers ideas for communication, relationships, school and daily routines. It combines practical features with children’s stories and separate, more detailed material for parents.
Robert Lawrence Stine
Choose this for a reader who enjoys interactive horror, making decisions and revisiting different routes. Its strongest appeal is variety: the cruise can lead towards experiments, pursuit, survival situations and many endings.
Shaunta Grimes
Expect a high-stakes resistance story centred on loyalty, oppression and difficult choices. Its speculative world includes a plague’s aftermath, time-travelling operatives and a society controlled through medicine, walls and surveillance.
Audrey Couloumbis
This is an adventure about two sisters facing repeated bereavement, separation from familiar homes and an uncertain journey. The sisters’ resourcefulness and choices drive the available premise.
Emily R. King
This is an action-led fantasy centred on a young woman resisting an oppressive marriage system. Magic, court danger, loyalty and romantic tension drive the story, with freedom and protection shaping Kalinda’s choices.
Melissa Welliver
This is a speculative romance about a compulsory soulmate connection made dangerous by shared pain and mortality. Zoe’s preparedness meets Milo’s risk-taking, creating a survival problem as well as a relationship dilemma.
Scarlett Dunmore
A horror-comedy sequel with a strongly supernatural setting, school friendships and a continuing threat from Charley’s past. Its appeal lies in combining eerie atmosphere with genre-aware humour and a central relationship marked by betrayal.
Linda Sue Park
A focused, dual-narrative historical novel about displacement, survival and access to water. Its language is spare, but the experiences include war, deaths and severe deprivation, balanced by perseverance and collective problem-solving.
Elen Caldecott
A tense historical survival story centred on two sisters, with vivid attention to language, place and the aftermath of political collapse. It combines danger and emotional uncertainty with questions about belonging and self-determination.
Tracy Darnton
A tense story about a young person trying to escape a parent’s extreme survivalist rules while navigating foster care, distrust and the possibility of being found. Its emotional force comes from Amber’s guarded, sharply ironic voice.
Robert Muchamore
This is a fast-moving wartime escape story combining orphanhood, sibling loyalty and espionage. Its child characters repeatedly make difficult choices while trying to survive danger, loss and separation.
Kody Keplinger
A tense story about girls seeking safety and belonging under Sol’s control. As new relationships and demands unsettle the cabin, the book follows questions of loyalty, selfhood, survival and whether protection can become coercion.
Sue Lynn Tan
A dramatic fantasy romance about survival and self-determination, this book offers a Cinderella framework reshaped by court politics, deception, magic and peril. Yining’s search for her past and future sits alongside questions about whom to trust.
Finbar Hawkins
A dark, atmospheric story for readers who enjoy ghosts, folklore, natural magic and narratives that connect across time. Three girls face danger and loss while their stories gradually converge around a threatening presence in the woods.
Miranda Reason
This is a tense post-apocalyptic survival novel about two isolated siblings forced into an unfamiliar society. Its action-driven journey is paired with questions about how stories and memories shape beliefs about people and the lost world.
Peadar O’Guilin
A fast, threatening fantasy about teenagers preparing for an ordeal that can permanently alter or kill them. Its strongest distinctive element is Nessa’s disability and refusal to be treated with pity.
Jules Howard
This offers an unusual way into evolution: each decision moves the reader towards another organism, making traits, environments and survival part of an active exploration rather than a page-by-page narrative.
Livia Blackburne
This is a fast-moving fantasy about survival, theft, vengeance and shifting loyalties. Kyra’s independence and uncertainty about her identity sit alongside Tristam’s grief-driven mission, while their partnership complicates both their goals.
Crescent Dragonwagon, Paul Zindel
This is a serious coming-of-age novel about a young person trying to make a life after family damage. Its emotional centre is the tension between survival, intimacy, responsibility and the limits of one person’s ability to rescue another.
Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings
This is a nature-centred coming-of-age story about affection, survival and responsibility. Jody’s bond with Flag is deeply important, while the family’s precarious livelihood makes loving choices difficult rather than simple.
Mark Mulle
A game-based adventure about friendship, exploration and danger, centred on Mike's encounters with other players and the mystery of a destroyed village.
Debra Dockter
A fast-moving science-fiction mystery about identity, genetic engineering and survival. Kyle’s investigation combines family comparison, secrets and a race against time, with romantic feelings forming alongside the central danger.
Scott Westerfeld, Margo Lanagan, Deborah Biancotti
Expect a fast, high-stakes superhero science-fiction adventure centred on six teenagers, crowd-dependent powers and a new threat that tests their loyalties, identities and leadership.
John Smelcer
A tense wilderness story about a grandson confronting uncertainty when his highly experienced grandfather does not return. Its strongest apparent focus is Johnny’s pressured judgement: should he rely on inherited knowledge or trust his own instincts?
Patricia C. Wrede
This looks like a brisk fantasy adventure centred on a resourceful child whose habits of survival bring her into contact with real magic. Its strongest offer is the tension between streetwise independence and the possibility of trust, training and change.
Michael Grant
This is a dark survival fantasy about young people managing hunger, danger and power without adults. Its central pressures are scarcity, conflict between powered and unpowered children, murderous behaviour, and influence from a threatening supernatural presence.
Diane Ganzer
This is an adventure about wanting freedom, facing consequences and trying to return home. Its central tension is between Ricky's desire to explore and the responsibilities others say he has.
Michael Grant, Michael Grant
A high-stakes survival thriller where young people suddenly have to manage danger, scarcity and power without adults. It offers an intense imagined world of frightening change, rivalries and unresolved threat.
Justine Larbalestier
This is a fantasy about survival under an impossible magical choice, with Reason isolated in an unfamiliar city and trying to manage power she does not yet understand.
Chuck Kelly
This is a fantasy rescue adventure about a young prince challenging parental authority to help someone in danger. It offers peril, a fantastical setting and an ending that leaves room for more adventures.
Amy Kathleen Ryan
This is a high-stakes science-fiction story about young people confronting attack, separation and competing expectations. Personal relationships matter alongside survival, leadership and the future of two space communities.
Patricia McCormick
This is a stark survival story about poverty, deception and sexual exploitation, centred on Lakshmi’s endurance and friendships after she is taken from Nepal to India.