Books like Nnedi Okorafor

Faith Sunderly is clever, scientifically curious, and nearly invisible to adults who assume girls cannot think seriously. When her family arrives on an isolated island beneath a cloud of rumor, she begins watching, questioning, and testing the stories everyone else accepts.

Like Okorafor, Hardinge treats knowledge as both power and danger. Faith’s exclusion becomes an instrument: she notices hypocrisy, half-truths, and the ways authority protects itself. The eerie fantasy grows from those tensions rather than replacing them, and Hardinge’s luxuriant, exact prose makes every discovery feel illicit. This rare children’s novel to win the overall Costa Book of the Year is a superb choice for readers who admired Sunny’s intelligence more than any conventional chosen-one heroics.

Corinne La Mer fears neither the forbidden forest nor the stories about creatures hiding there—until a pair of yellow eyes suggests the old tales may be true. Baptiste draws on Caribbean folklore without turning it into decorative mythology: the jumbies belong to the island’s history, landscape, and arguments about who has the right to call it home.

Corinne’s prickly confidence makes her an appealing counterpart to Sunny, while the novel offers the same exhilarating mixture of neighborhood life, family bonds, humor, and genuine menace. Its magic has rules and consequences, but victory depends as much on loyalty and self-knowledge as supernatural talent. The opening volume of a beloved trilogy, The Jumbies is lean, vivid, and frightening in exactly the way a fireside story should be.

In the seemingly peaceful city of Lucille, adults insist that monsters no longer exist. Jam has been raised to believe them—until a strange horned creature emerges from one of her mother’s paintings and declares that it has come to hunt something hidden nearby.

Pet shares Akata Witch’s deepest moral conviction: young people can recognize truths that adults overlook, suppress, or explain away. Emezi complicates every easy category—monster and protector, safety and denial, speech and silence—while giving Jam, a Black trans girl who often communicates by signing, a quietly formidable presence. The spare prose makes the fantastic feel startlingly immediate, and the novel’s National Book Award finalist status reflects its unusual combination of accessibility and ethical force. It is short enough to read in a sitting and difficult to stop thinking about afterward.