By Adam Gidwitz
A nervous new boy and the fearless girl who befriends him find a real Jersey Devil in the woods on his first day of school, and get drafted into a secret society sworn to protect mythical creatures.
Elliot Eisner is the new boy at a new school in New Jersey, and his very first day is a field trip. The teacher running it, Professor Mito Fauna, is the strangest adult Elliot has ever met, muttering in Spanish and Latin and driving like a maniac. The only child who will talk to Elliot is Uchenna Devereaux, who makes up songs about everything and is afraid of nothing at all. Out in the Pine Barrens, Uchenna hears a noise and wanders straight off the path, and the two of them find a small blue-furred creature with wings and a horse's head. It's the Jersey Devil, it is entirely real, and it takes to them immediately. Then Professor Fauna explains what he actually is: a member of the Unicorn Rescue Society, an ancient order that protects the world's mythical creatures. Which makes the Schmoke Brothers, two greedy billionaires who want the creature for themselves, the problem of two children who met that morning.
If your child has never done fantasy, the hardest part is usually the front of the book: a made-up world, a map, fifty names to learn before anything happens. This one skips all of it. It opens in a real American state on a real school field trip with a real first-day-at-a-new-school feeling, and the magic walks in about thirty pages later. Everything your child has to hold in their head is already familiar. Hatem Aly's drawings are on nearly every spread, the chapters are quick, and Gidwitz is funny in the way that makes a child read the sentence out to you. It also gives them a way in that fantasy rarely offers: the creatures aren't there to be fought, they're there to be looked after.