By Nick Eliopulos
The official Minecraft chapter book: five friends test a science teacher's VR headset, land inside the game for real, and have to survive the first night.
Morgan and his friends get asked to try out their science teacher's virtual reality Minecraft project, which is already the best sentence a Minecraft player has ever read. Then it goes further than a headset should. They are inside the world, standing in it, and the sun is going down, and none of them has a shelter. So they do what your child would do: punch trees, dig in, build fast, argue about the plan. Mobs come. And one zombie doesn't behave the way a zombie is supposed to behave, which is the thread that pulls them into the rest of the series. It is short, it is loud, and there is a Luke Flowers drawing every few pages.
This is the official Minecraft chapter book series, and it is the smaller, easier door than the Minecraft novels. A hundred and forty-four pages, big type, short chapters, a drawing every few pages, and five friends who talk the way your child and their friends talk while they play. For a seven or eight year old who has read guides and comics but never a chapter book on their own, this is a whole book finished in a couple of nights, which is the win. There are five more behind it if it lands.