About McKelle's Books
Why the site exists, what it is trying to do, and where its data comes from.
How McKelle's Books came to be
A classroom library that outgrew its shelves.
McKelle's Books started with a collection that had grown past its bookcase. Parents kept asking the same question — what should my child read next? — and the answers were scattered across reading lists, award shortlists and dog-eared notebooks.
That collection is now the catalog behind this site: thousands of titles, each with its genre, reading measures and sources recorded, so any suggestion can be traced back to where it came from.
What we are trying to do
Practical recommendations, with the reasoning left visible.
Our aim is simple: make it easy to hand a child a book they will finish. That means matching on what a reader enjoys and how they read, not on a single grade level.
We also want to show our working. Suggestions follow from catalog data, and the description of a book keeps a record of where it was written, so nothing rests on an unsourced claim.
Where the data comes from
Every title is documented.
Book records, descriptions and reading measures come from the catalog export, cross-referenced against Goodreads, AR BookFinder, Open Library and Google Books.
Descriptions keep their origin, so the provenance of a blurb is never lost. Titles that cannot be sourced confidently are held back rather than guessed at.
The lists this catalog is built from
A book is a book; a list is somebody's judgement. These are the judgements recorded against our titles, and they are why a recommendation can be checked instead of taken on faith.
Award Winners — 260 books, 65 awards
Newbery Medal and Honor, Caldecott Medal and Honor, ALA Notable Books, the NCTE language-arts list, Booklist Editors' Choice. An award says adults thought the book good; it says nothing about whether a particular child will finish it.
Recommended Reading — 282 books, 45 lists
Library and reading-programme lists: the New York Public Library's 100 Best Titles, Reading Rainbow, Junior Library Guild selections, NCSS/CBC Notable Social Studies, the Elementary School Library Collection. The broadest of our list evidence, and the noisiest.
Curriculum lists — 1,463 books
Other people's reading schedules, arranged by school year: Ambleside Online (895 books, much the largest of them), The Good and the Beautiful (339), Thomas Jefferson Education (230, across its three age bands), Beautiful Feet (189), and Deep Roots (117). We keep these lists because they are curated for rich prose, deep narrative, informative story, and characters who learn and grow through formative — sometimes hard — experience.
The source sheet's own lists — 2,071 books
List memberships recorded by hand against a book rather than inherited from its blurb or its awards: the ALSC Notables (1,423 books, by far the largest single list we hold), Halsted's Best Friends (240), the Mensa reading lists by age band (202), Davidson's gifted-reader list (130), the Harvard Classics (129), and Time Magazine's hundred best of 1923–2005 (40). Several of these lists also reach titles counted in the panels above, so a book can stand on more than one.
Classics — 213 books
A standing list of titles old enough to have outlived their first readers. Broad and unglamorous, and where much of the read-aloud shelf comes from.
What Kids Are Reading — Renaissance, 2016–2019
Yearly counts of what children actually chose, grade by grade. Small in our catalogue — a few dozen titles — and strange in kind: popularity rather than quality, which is exactly why it is worth keeping separate.
Common Core Appendix B
Titles named as exemplars of text complexity. Narrow, authoritative, and about difficulty rather than delight.
Power Lessons AR and Vocabulary — 73 books
Books picked for guided reading instruction. A teaching list rather than a pleasure list.
Other places worth looking
Our catalog is deep on measures and thin on mood. These sites are the other way round, and between them they answer questions we deliberately do not: is this book appropriate, will a parent recognise it, and what should we read aloud tonight.
A Mighty Girl
Books with girl and women protagonists, sorted by age and theme — courage, science, adventure, history. Strongest for roughly ages six to twelve. Curated by hand, and not levelled.
https://www.amightygirl.com/booksCommon Sense Media
Judgements about content rather than difficulty: violence, fear, language, romance. Where to look when the question is whether a book is appropriate right now — something this site does not decide for you.
https://www.commonsensemedia.org/book-reviewsReading Rockets
Booklists by theme, plus how children learn to read and what to do when it is not going well. Best for the early reader and the adult helping them.
https://www.readingrockets.org/books-and-authorsWhat Kids Are Reading
The same report we draw list data from, in full: what children are reading grade by grade, with the measures attached.
https://www.renaissance.com/wkar/Storyline Online
Actors reading picture books aloud on video, with the illustrations shown. For bedtime, for a preliterate listener, or for a day when nobody wants to read out loud.
https://storylineonline.net/