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Oh! Anne McCaffrey's Brainship series is a treat to read!

Nick and Tesla's High Voltage Danger Lab and Nick and Tesla's Robot Army Rampage

Books devoured at our house recently by DS 8

Chickadee - by Louise Erdrich

Dumpling Days - by Grace Lin

Escape From Mr. Lemoncello's Library - by Chris Grabenstein

That's a good idea! Somewhere on another forum someone was asking about YA SF and this would've been a good suggestion. There's a great deal of fantasy for kids, but much less good science fiction.

On a related note, though, I'd caution about Anne McCaffrey's Dragonriders of Pern series, some of which turn up listed as YA. These are great books and kids will like them, but because of the reproductive processes of the dragons, I'd avoid 'em until middle school age or pre-read each book individually.

I let DD10 (then 9, I think) read the Harper Hall series within the dragon riders books, Aufilia - it's pretty clean.

The first two Harper Hall books are clean (and they hang together very well as a duology by themselves), but there's a three page face-to-black scene at the beginning of chapter 11 in Dragondrums that I wouldn't be ok with for this age.

It's not explicit (and I can't recall the other books being explicit either) but I think there's a lot of complexity and grayness and hair-splitting around the nature of consent and consensual relationships that I wouldn't want to try to dive into at this age.

Huh - I just went and found it. I had no idea what that meant when I was 12 and read it, and my DD apparently didn't either, because she didn't mention it to me. I see it now as an adult, though.

I remember being totally shocked by that scene when I first read it at 12. But then, I managed to get ahold of such classics as Clan of the Cavebear that very same year, which is Very Educational reading in many respects. (Ahhh, the dangers of being being undersupervised by harried parents in a public library...)

DD10 is reading The Mysterious Benedict Society series and enjoying it a lot.

She read The Giver in school this past year so I just placed a pre-order on Amazon for The Giver quartet; which condenses all 4 books by Lois Lowry into one novel. I think she will love reading the three follow up books to The Giver.