Summer Picks for Kids (and Parents)

A curated selection of our favorite activity & SEL books to keep kids engaged and entertained all summer long, plus a few thoughtful books for parents, hand-picked by parents.

Note: All online purchases will be shipped to Transom Bookshop in Tarrytown. We’ll email you when your books are ready to be picked up.

Kids Nonfiction Books

Activities, Health, Life Skills, Social Responsibility, and Social & Emotional Learning

Kids Fiction and Graphic Novels

Books for Parents

The Amazing Generation!
$30.00

A must-read for all parents: the generation-defining investigation into the collapse of youth mental health in the era of smartphones, social media, and big tech—and a plan for a healthier, freer childhood.

“With tenacity and candor, Haidt lays out the consequences that have come with allowing kids to drift further into the virtual world . . . While also offering suggestions and solutions that could help protect a new generation of kids.” —Shannon Carlin, TIME, 100 Must-Read Books of 2024

The Motherload: Episodes from the Brink of Motherhood
$29.99

An unflinching motherhood memoir that dares to ask what happens when “what to expect when you’re expecting” turns out to be months of rage, anguish, brain fog, and a total surrender of sex, career, and identity.

Untethered: Creating Connected Families, Schools, and Communities
$30.00

Over the past decade, children’s mental health challenges have reached epidemic levels—stress, anxiety, childhood depression, and suicide are at unprecedented high rates. Amid high-stakes pressure for kids to succeed, parents and teachers have never needed a road map to healthy child development more urgently.

And as psychologist and educator Doug Bolton explains in this eye-opening and powerful guide, underlying our modern-day stresses is an even more pervasive problem: We’re relying on practices that are not in line with what science tells us about how to truly motivate children and help them thrive.

Of Boys and Men
$28.99

A positive vision for masculinity in a more equal world.

Boys and men are struggling. Profound economic and social changes of recent decades have many losing ground in the classroom, the workplace, and in the family. While the lives of women have changed, the lives of many men have remained the same or even worsened.

Our attitudes, our institutions, and our laws have failed to keep up. Conservative and progressive politicians, mired in their own ideological warfare, fail to provide thoughtful solutions.

The father of three sons, a journalist, and a Brookings Institution scholar, Richard V. Reeves has spent twenty-five years worrying about boys both at home and work. His new book, Of Boys and Men, tackles the complex and urgent crisis of boyhood and manhood.

Reeves looks at the structural challenges that face boys and men and offers fresh and innovative solutions that turn the page on the corrosive narrative that plagues this issue. Of Boys and Men argues that helping the other half of society does not mean giving up on the ideal of gender equality.

Nasty, Brutish, and Short: Adventures in Philosophy with Kids
$20.00

Some of the best philosophers in the world gather in surprising places—preschools and playgrounds. They debate questions about metaphysics and morality, even though they’ve never heard those words and can’t tie their shoes. They’re kids. And as University of Michigan professor of philosophy and law Scott Hershovitz shows, they can help grown-ups solve some of life’s greatest mysteries.