Bold and Brave: Novels With Daring Young Protagonists for Adult Readers
Posted on June 9, 2025
by Amy H
There’s something truly wonderful about intrepid young narrators in novels. The books below feature strong kiddos and teens with spunk and smarts, who navigate their lives with curiosity, wit and courage. When life gets you down, these are great ways to rediscover the hopefulness and resiliency of youth.
the sweetness at the bottom of the pie by Alan Bradley
It is the summer of 1950-and at the once-grand mansion of Buckshaw, 11-year-old Flavia de Luce, an aspiring chemist with a passion for poisons, is intrigued by a series of inexplicable events: A dead bird is found on the doorstep, a postage stamp bizarrely pinned to its beak. Then, hours later, Flavia finds a man lying in the cucumber patch and watches him as he takes his dying breath. For Flavia, who is both appalled and delighted, life begins in earnest when murder comes to Buckshaw. "I wish I could say I was afraid, but I wasn't. Quite the contrary. This was by far the most interesting thing that had ever happened to me in my entire life."
vera, or faith by Gary Shteyngart
The Bradford-Shmulkin family is falling apart. A very modern blend of Russian, Jewish, Korean, and New England WASP, they love one another deeply but the pressures of life in an unstable America are fraying their bonds. There's Daddy, a struggling, cash-thirsty editor whose Russian heritage gives him a surprising new currency in the upside-down world of twenty-first-century geopolitics; his wife, Anne Mom, a progressive, underfunded blue blood from Boston who's barely holding the household together; their son, Dylan, whose blond hair and Mayflower lineage provide him pride of place in the newly forming American political order; and, above all, the young Vera, half-Jewish, half-Korean, and wholly original. Observant, sensitive, and always writing down new vocabulary words, Vera wants only three things in life: to make a friend at school; Daddy and Anne Mom to stay together; and to meet her birth mother, Mom Mom, who will at last tell Vera the secret of who she really is and how to ensure love's survival in this great, mad, imploding world.
the trouble with goats and sheep by Joanna Cannon
In 1976 England, 10-year-old friends Grace and Tilly, after their neighbor Mrs. Creasy goes missing, decide to take matters into their own hands and find her and bring her home, going door to door in search of clues and soon discovering that everyone on the Avenue has something to hide.
rabbit cake by Annie Hartnett
A debut novel by an award-winning writer follows the darkly comic experiences of a precocious 12-year-old girl named Elvis who worries about her troubled family and tries to figure out her place in the world in the aftermath of her mother's accidental death.
the evolution of calpurnia tate by Jacqueline Kelly
Curious about the grasshoppers in her backyard in rural Texas, 11-year-old Calpurnia turns to her avid naturalist grandfather for information and ends up with a newfound respect for the natural world, the way it operates, and the similarities it shares with her own life as the only daughter in a family with six brothers, in this coming-of-age tale set in 1899.
the spellman files by Lisa Lutz
Izzy Spellman may be the narrator/main character in this wonderfully funny novel about a highly functioning yet supremely dysfunctional family of private investigators, but my favorite is her younger tween sister Rae, the reason for this book being on this list. A brilliant negotiator, the tween is a wonderful foil for her zany family who spend as much time snooping on each other as they do their clients.
true grit by Charles Portis
In 1878, Mattie Ross is just fourteen when the coward Tom Chaney shoots her father in Fort Smith, Arkansas, and robs him of his life, his horse, and $150 cash. Filled with an unwavering urge to avenge her father’s blood, Mattie finds and, after some tenacious finagling, enlists one-eyed Rooster Cogburn, the meanest available US Marshal, as her partner in pursuit, and they head off into Indian Territory after the killer.
the screaming staircase by Jonathan Stroud
This is also a wonderful single-season streaming series on Netflix (because truly, nothing gold can stay). When London is overrun by malevolent spirits, psychically gifted 15-year-old Lucy Carlisle joins a talented group of young paranormal detectives competing against other ghostbusting agencies in the debut of a fantastic series that finds the three intrepid colleagues investigating one of England's most haunted houses.
mosquitoland by David Arnold
Mim Malone is dragged from her home in northern Ohio to the “wastelands” of Mississippi to live with her dad and new stepmom. Before the dust has a chance to settle, she learns her mother is sick. So she hops aboard a northbound Greyhound bus to her "real" home and mother in Cleveland, meeting a quirky cast of fellow travelers along the way. But when her thousand-mile journey takes a few turns she could never see coming, Mim must confront her own demons, redefining her notions of love, loyalty, and what it means to be sane.
one crazy summer by Rita Williams-Garcia
Eleven-year-old Delphine is like a mother to her two younger sisters, Vonetta and Fern. She's had to be, ever since their mother, Cecile, left them seven years ago for a radical new life in California. But when the sisters arrive from Brooklyn to spend the summer with their mother, Cecile is nothing like they imagined. While the girls hope to go to Disneyland and meet Tinker Bell, their mother sends them to a day camp run by the Black Panthers. Unexpectedly, Delphine, Vonetta, and Fern learn much about their family, their country, and themselves during one truly crazy summer.
anne of green gables by L. M. Montgomery
The gold standard for girlhood spunk, Anne's story is always worth another read (or re-watch the wonderful CBC series!). In 1876, Anne Shirley is an eleven-year-old orphan who has hung on determinedly to an optimistic spirit and a wildly creative imagination through her early deprivations. She erupts into the lives of aging brother and sister Matthew and Marilla Cuthbert, a girl instead of the boy they had sent for. Thus begins a story of transformation for all three; indeed the whole rural community of Avonlea comes under Anne's influence in some way. We see her grow from a girl to a young woman of sixteen, making her mistakes, and not always learning from them. Intelligent, hot-headed as her own red hair, unwilling to take a moral truth as read until she works it out for herself, she must also face grief and loss and learn the true meaning of love. Part Tom Sawyer, part Jane Eyre, Anne is a heroine for all ages.
hattie big sky by Kirby Larson
In 1917, after inheriting her uncle's homesteading claim in Montana, sixteen-year-old orphan Hattie Brooks travels from Iowa to make a home for herself. In the beautiful but harsh setting, she has less than a year to fence and cultivate the land in order to keep it. Neighbors who welcome Hattie help heal the hurt she has suffered from years of feeling unwanted. Chapters open with short articles that Hattie writes for an Iowa newspaper or her lively letters to a friend and possible beau who is in the military in France. The authentic first-person narrative, full of hope and anxiety, effectively portrays Hattie's struggles as a young woman with limited options, a homesteader facing terrible odds, and a loyal citizen confused about the war and the local anti-German bias that endangers her new immigrant friends. Larson, whose great-grandmother homesteaded alone in Montana, read dozens of homesteaders' journals and based scenes in the book on real events.
a beautiful family by Jennifer Trevelyan
An observant ten-year-old, Alix catches more than her parents and older sister suspect. Over their summer break, Alix's mother plans to finish her novel, her father wants to cook on the grill and watch cricket, and her fifteen-year-old sister hopes to catch the eye of a local lifeguard. With everyone around her distracted, Alix and her new friend, Kahu, decide to solve a mystery that haunts this vacation community: they'll close the case of what happened to Charlotte, a child who was presumed drowned the year before. But things aren't quite as they seem, and as Alix and Kahu look for clues, they inadvertently dislodge information they'll wish they'd never uncovered. Are Alix's parents happy together? Is her sister putting her trust in the wrong people? Is their vacation rental as safe as it seems? And when someone else goes missing, Alix's family find themselves at the center of an urgent police investigation. Debut novelist Jennifer Trevelyan viscerally captures the special boredoms and frustrations of childhood, the fraught but unshakeable bond between sisters, and the dangers that lurk in the white lies we tell--especially about the people we love most.
the selected works of t. s. spivet by Reif Larsen
Twelve-year-old genius cartographer Tecumseh Sparrow (T.S.) Spivet receives an unexpected prestigious award from the Smithsonian and life as normal-if you consider mapping family dinner table conversation normal-is interrupted and a wild cross-country adventure begins, taking T.S. from his family ranch in northern Montana to the museum's hallowed halls in Washington D.C. T.S. hops a freight train and once aboard, his adventures step into high gear and he meticulously maps, charts, and illustrates his exploits, documenting mythical wormholes in the Midwest, the urban phenomenon of "rims," and the pleasures of McDonald's, among other things. We come to see the world through T.S.'s eyes and in his thorough investigation of the outside world he also reveals himself. A secret family history found within his luggage tells the story of T.S.'s ancestors and their long-ago passage west, offering profound insight into the family he left behind and his role within it. This wonderfully illustrated book inspires us to reconnect to the wisdom of childhood most of us have lost.
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