The Grimm Legacy

Written by: Polly Shulman

First line: Snow fell hard: big stick flakes that got under my coat collar where the top button was missing.

Why you should read this book: Since her widower father remarried a woman with two greedy daughters, her best friend moved far away, and she was forced to change schools and quit dance lessons, Elizabeth feels like nothing so much as Cinderella without a fairy godmother, until her favorite history teacher recommends her for a job at the New-York Circulating Material Repository. The Repository, a massive lending collection of museum quality objects, becomes a haven of delight, where Elizabeth makes friends with the other pages, and discovers a series of mysteries, all of which seem to lead back to the mysterious Grimm Collection, where truly magical fairy tale objects are kept under lock and key. The kids all have their own theories about what's going on, and their alliances are uneasy and full of suspicion, but Elizabeth has plenty of motivation for searching out the truth, not the least of which is that she's sort of traded something that turned out to be a lot more valuable than she thought it was for a magic comb to make her prettier, and if she can't solve all these thefts and disappearances, she'll never recover in integral piece of herself.

Why you shouldn't read this book: You hate little siblings, your own or other people's.