New middle grade speculative fiction

 FINALLY finding my way back to doing some reading!  Here are two good new ones I found.  

The first one is called The Book of the Stolen Dreams by David Farr.  It's about a brother and sister, Robert and Rachel, who have been tasked by their father to find a book of stolen dreams and use it to bring down an evil dictator, Charles Malstain.  The book, it turns out, holds the secret to the line between the living and the dead, allowing the person who controls the book to potentially, live forever.  There are a number of protections set up for the book (it's been around awhile and the family that helped create it knew the power that it had, as well as it's potential for abuse) so a really wonderful part of the book is watching Rachel and Robert try to figure out who they should trust.  This is a very exciting book with lots of plot twists.  The evil villain is wonderfully evil, in a way that some readers will draw parallels to things that are happening today.  I thought this one was great.  Reading this one will leave with readers with lots of options for conversations about life and death and living forever as well as how rulers can change over time and how the idea of term limits maybe isn't a bad idea.  Don't miss this one.

Here's the author introducing the book.

And here he is reading an excerpt.  

The second is called Abeni's Song.  It's written by P. Djeli Clark.  It's about Abeni, who is just 12 as the story starts.  The Harvest Festival is starting and Abeni really wants to move onto her grownup life, but the adults in her community are determined to protect her innocence as long as possible.  She has been having strange dreams about a song that is so compelling, it makes her want to leave her family and community and as she starts talking to her friends, they have also been having the same dream.  It turns out that a magical woman, who helped Abeni come into the world, has been protecting the village.  The dreams she sent were a warning, but the adults of the village are not listening.  As the woman, Asha, tries louder and louder to send the warning message, a storm approaches that includes strange warriors.  Asha offers to take one child and protect the rest and Abeni's mother offers Abeni.  The entire village is wiped out and the children dance off to the strangely magical song.  Abeni is angry and wants to go back to her family but finds that the village has been destroyed and so she makes her home with Asha, with a promise that Asha will train her so that she can go and find her family,  The rest of the book is a magical quest with some amazing characters (a panther and a porcupine!) as well as some super scary villains.  The story has a satisfying but not completely resolved ending, so I'm hoping there will be more!  Abeni and Asha are both wonderful characters and I'd really love to read more of their adventures.  This story is set in Africa and one of the things I liked about this one a lot was a conversation about what had happened to the parents of the kids who escaped and what kept coming up was that the parents had been sent on ghost ships to a land faraway from which they would never return.  It doesn't take a big leap to make that into how Africans were kidnapped from their homes and sent out on ghost ships to a land from which they would never return.  The folklore around that part of history is pretty sketchy so having a story to hang that historical context on awesome.  The fact that the story is told by kids and that the kids are not only the heroes, but the villains are also pretty amazing.   I really liked this story and I hope you're going to like it too!

Check out this gorgeous cover!