Books don’t always have to be new to be good, right? Enter the reissue, when publisher dust off some good stuff and republish it with a new look to appeal to a new crop of kids. This series is nearly 20 years old, but is ripe for reading by a whole new generation with a little rebranding.
Screech Owls:
Mystery at Lake Placid (978 1 77049 413 8)
The Night They Stole the Stanley Cup
Peril At The World’s Biggest Hockey Tournament
Face-Off At the Alamo (978 1 77049 418 3)
Sudden Death in New York City (978 1 77049 415 2)
The Ghost of the Stanley Cup (978 1 77049 416 9)
by Roy McGregor
Tundra Books
This series is one of those standard recommendations for boys, especially, and for girls who like sports books. It’s pretty great reluctant reader fare, combining sports, mystery, and action in one package, and the fact that it is also Canadian is a nice bonus for those of us who like to make sure our kids read some homegrown material and support Canada’s excellent kids lit community. In each book, the Screech Owls hockey team gets dragged into a mystery while on the road for tournaments, and everything comes, of course, down to the wire in order to build a nice level of suspense for the middle grade audience.
One of the beauties of a series, especially for those who are not naturally drawn to reading, is that there is a comfort factor in getting to know the characters and having a sense of what to expect. For parents, there is the added benefit that once your child gets hooked into a series, you have a good few books to chew through before you have to find another place to start – in this case, we’ve got six new books to keep your kids going for a while!