Summer is for family read-alouds! ☀️📖
Today is my kids’ last day of school — bye, 7th and 3rd grade — and we are looking forward to lots of reading out loud together. Some of these we’ll read all as a family, some are for my son to tackle on his own, and some are just for my daughter and me.
Here’s the stack:
- Wishtree
- Ruby in the Sky
- Bridge to Terabithia
- Tuck Everlasting
- Hello, Universe
- Astrid the Unstoppable
- Alice with a Why
- Chronicles of Whetherwhy
- Superteacher
- Faker
- The Firefly Summer
- The Second Life of Snap
- Esperanza Rising
- We Dream of Space
There’s a particular joy to reading aloud that I don’t think ever really goes away, even as the kids get older. You slow down. You hear the sentences. You catch the small choices an author made that you’d have skimmed right past on your own — and honestly, as an editor, that’s some of the best craft-reading I do all year. Middle grade especially rewards it; the good ones are doing so much with so few words.
See any favorites in there? Anything we absolutely have to get to before September? 💬
Toni Rocchetti is a copy editor helping authors strengthen their narratives, deepen character arcs, and find the story that is already in the draft. She reads 80+ books a year across literary fiction, memoir, and nonfiction — and writes about what she is learning along the way. Work with Toni →
