Downpour. © 2025 by Yuko Ohnari and Koshiro Hata.

As longtime readers know, pleasure reading is a core value of the hundred-plus-year-old Horn Book, and Summer Reading provides an opportunity to follow that bliss. Or to discover a new type of bliss. Or to have your bliss challenged. We welcome it all! Reading is a lifelong pleasure, and everyone from the very youngest listeners to teenagers and beyond can find one or many titles to enjoy from our lists for all ages (as we always say: age levels are only suggestions; the individual reader is the real criterion).

Our featured image is from Downpour: Splish! Splash! Ker-splash! by Yuko Ohnari and Koshiro Hata, translated from Japanese by Emily Balistrieri, and starred in the May/June 2025 Horn Book Magazine Special Issue: Perception and Reality. There are lots of rainy-day books out there (Heatwave, on 2024’s Horn Book Fanfare list, was one of my favorites of last year), but this one stands out for its varied visual perspectives, fun-to-say onomatopoeia, and general liveliness. Perfect for waiting out a summer thunderstorm and ker-splashing in the puddles.

For Five Questions, we turned to Friend of the Horn Book Brian Selznick, whose YA debut, Run Away with Me (also starred in May/June), a queer romance, is wistful, dreamlike, sweet, and romantic. If you can’t make it to Rome (!) this summer, the visual and word pictures crafted by Selznick might bring you one step closer. Buona lettura!

Print out or bookmark our Summer Reading booklist and use it for reference at your local library or any/all of your favorite independent bookstores. See also the upcoming July/August Horn Book Magazine for additional recommended summer-set titles. 

Picture Books | Beginning Readers and Primary Grades
Intermediate | Middle School | High School

From the April 2025 issue of Notes from the Horn Book: Summer Reading. For past years’ summer reading lists from The Horn Book, click on the tag summer reading.