March Break Reads 2025
As Seen on CTV Your Morning
March break is almost here! Whether you’re headed out on a road trip, poolside, or looking for a way to spend an afternoon, here are eight Canadian titles to keep your young reader occupied. You can watch this segment here at the 1.19.59 mark.
Picture Books
Sunny Wants to Play is a gentle story about what it feels like to be the youngest member of a large intergenerational family. Despite being surrounded by people, Sunny longs for someone closer in age to play with. But when she gets her wish, she realizes that sometimes it’s nice to be the only kid in a big loving family. Spare prose and delicate vintage art that leaves a lot of space in the book for kids to use their own imagination. In Shark Girl, Canadian comics superstar Kate Beaton returns to picture books with a twist on The Little Mermaid. Shark Girl is part shark, part girl. With the help of a sea witch, she decides to explore her human side in order to seek revenge on a sea captain who overfishes and is generally unpleasant. Subtle themes of environmentalism, revenge, and justice are present but don’t overshadow the humour or personality of this contemporary fairytale.
Graphic Novel Chapter Books
Two hilarious series featuring quirky animal characters return. Big City Buns is the second Fluffle Bunny book, featuring three hapless rabbits causing havoc in their city. This time around, the city is holding a Cheese-Flavoured-Crackers Festival which leads to all sorts of fair-related hijinx and the promise of more adventures. The Great Puptective series features unlikely crime-solving duo of a puppy and cat. In the second title, Purranormal Activity, the duo investigate whether their new neighbour is in fact a ghost. Both series feature classic hallmarks of the graphic novel chapter book- unlikely friends, wordplay, and the inventive and whimsical perspective of how animals interpret the human world.
Novels
Middle Grade
Recipe for Rhyme and Rescue features a middle school poetry club dedicated to writing food poetry. We follow the club over the course of a summer, during which they explore each other’s cultures and family history through food. A lovely ode to the diversity of Toronto and how food and poetry can be both an expression of culture and cross-cultural connection. Inspiring to both cooks and poets!
What would you do if you accidentally stole a million dollars? Great fiction invites readers to walk in someone else’s shoes, and No Purchase Necessary presents a compelling moral dilemma that will make kids think about what they would do in the same siutation. In No Purchase Necessary, new student Ajay (pronounced Ah-jay) is one of very few ethnic kids at his school and is having trouble fitting in. To impress a classmate, he breaks his own moral code to steal a chocolate bar only to discover that particular bar has a million-dollar prize winning wrapper. Ajay is a character that kids will relate to and root for.
The Rehearsal Club is a mystery that unfolds over two timelines. Pal, a contemporary kid who has just moved to New York and has a love of improv, discovers an old mystery in the infamous The Rehearsal Room boarding house where her older sister, an aspiring actress, lives. The novel alternates between Pal’s perspective and the perspective of Olive, an actress in the early 1950s. Pal has great class clown energy and the mystery will have extra appeal for theatre kids.
Teen
In Wicked Darlings , aspiring investigative journalist Noa spends a summer following in her dead sister Leah’s footsteps, trying to solve the mystery of what really happened. Leah worked as a gossip journalist, reporting on the parties and scandals of the Manhattan elite, giving this book a Gossip Girl with a murderous twist vibe.