By Marjorie Liu
A girl raised by birds inside a magical tree sets out to find who's stealing their souls.
Zuli grew up inside the Great Tree, the place where the souls of birds are reborn, and she's the only child who can hear them singing. When those souls start disappearing, she leaves the one home she's ever known and goes looking for whoever is taking them. Her companions are an odd bunch: her guardian owl Frowly, a goblin thief who's been cast out by his own people, and a giant flying snake. What she finds out along the way is bigger and stranger than she expected.
This is the hardest, most grown-up-feeling book on the trail, and it sits at the top on purpose. It's a big, mythic fantasy, gorgeously painted, with real weight to the story. But it's still a graphic novel, so a child who won't go near a fat prose fantasy can hold a whole epic and actually get to the end of it. The world is dense and the plot is ambitious, and some children find it a little talky in stretches. That's the stretch, though. For a reluctant reader who's worked up to it, getting through something this serious and this beautiful feels like a real accomplishment.