Boys have adventures both big and small — and realistic and poignant and meta and supernatural! — in these books for intermediate and early middle-school readers.

In Boy's Best Friend by Kate Banks and Rupert Sheldrake, two sixth-grade dog owners living on Cape Cod devise an experiment based on scientist Sheldrake's real book Dogs That Know When Their Owners Are Coming Home. Newcomer Lester is a thoughtful only child who marches to his own drummer. George is the middle kid in a rambunctious family. Both boys are suffering losses. Lester is disoriented by his recent relocation from Denver. George's best friend Kyra has moved away. The essence of this story lies in Banks's brilliant evocation of boytalk and boythink; a level of scientific richness is added when George decides to write to Sheldrake with some questions. A real-life scientist corresponding with a fictional character — meta fun meets middle grade. (Farrar/Foster, 8–11 years)

"Oh, boy! A country broken up by a war, where people spoke a language with no vowels, and that no one could understand. The perfect place for a vacation!" Narrator Charlie, his little brother Max, and their parents set off to Croatia in The Traveling Circus by Marie-Louise Gay and David Homel. It's a place where people show how happy they are to see one another "by crushing each other with bear hugs and monster handshakes" and where Charlie and Max almost get arrested by a border guard all because Max has to pee. It's also where they meet the mysterious hermit of Vrgada and learn a subtle lesson about the costs of war. The slim volume is packed full of adventures in an unfamiliar landscape, where Charlie and Max live out an old-fashioned kind of childhood with a lot of freedom to go exploring. (Groundwood, 8–11 years)

A shortcut through the woods? What could go wrong? Neighbors and fellow outsiders Tamaya (fifth grade) and Marshall (seventh) — costars of Louis Sachar's Fuzzy Mud — are in bigger trouble than they know when Marshall diverts them from their usual route home in order to evade a bully, Chad. Not only does Chad know those woods, too, but there's a pool of weird mud that leaves Tamaya with a mysterious rash after she's grabbed a handful to sling into the bully's face. (You don't want to know what happens to him.) Interspersed excerpts of testimony from "secret Senate hearings" point to a microscopic manmade organism that seems to have escaped a secret laboratory. Sachar's exciting tale blends just-gross-enough horror with sober — if you can stop to think about it — consideration of ethics and science. (Delacorte, 9–12 years)

Another Kind of Hurricane by Tamara Ellis Smith stars two ten-year-old boys: Henry from Vermont and Zavion from New Orleans. Henry's best friend, Wayne, was killed in a fall on a mountain; Zavion lost almost everything he had in Hurricane Katrina. When Henry takes a marble — the marble he and Wayne used to pass back and forth when good luck was needed — from Wayne's casket, it serves as a remembrance, until his mother donates clothes, including Henry's jeans (with the marble in a pocket), to the Salvation Army in New Orleans, where Zavion gets the jeans and happens upon the marble. More than just a lucky talisman, the marble has a sort of magic that connects people, pulling them together. Smith's story of two young boys finding each other in a time of need is memorable and full of hope. (Random/Schwartz & Wade, 9–12 years)

From the July 2015 issue of Notes from the Horn Book.