Finders Keepers, Treasure Seekers
I used to be a very keen treasure hunter. A treasure hunter with no boundaries. As in, I would search through my siblings’ rooms in search of booty. What would I find? Empty candy wrappers and dried-up tubes of lipstick.
Now, you may be wondering, what happened to my treasure-hunting tendencies? Well, I learned to transfer them to books, where the treasure was always more bountiful than discarded candy wrappers, and the journey significantly more thrilling than sneaking into the rooms of my brother and sisters (though also a thrilling adventure every child should experience).
If you’ve got a treasure hunter on your hands, then the books below will excite and delight them! Filled with action, adventure, and treasure, of course, these books will enchant all readers. And, I can’t make any promises, but they might even keep them out of their siblings’ rooms!
The space rock is just the latest thing to land, uninvited, in Vega Lucero’s road-stop hometown. But when she discovers how much a chunk of the meteorite might be worth, she realizes it’s exactly the treasure she’s been hoping to find—and maybe a way to convince her mom not to sell the family store to big city developers to help pay for her grandpa Tata’s medical expenses.
Determined to find more pieces of the sky somewhere in the perilous desert wilderness, stubbornly independent Vega must set aside her distrust of outsiders to team up with Jasper, a would-be rival—and her own tagalong cousin Mila—on an overnight adventure to find more meteorites before the professional hunters who have descended on Date City do. But along the way, she realizes that she’s not the only one with the weight of the world on her shoulders. Jasper and Mila have secrets and worries of their own that has brought them on this journey.
Together, this ragtag group will battle against coyotes, a flood, and scorpions. But what they will ultimately discover is that no treasure is big enough to prevent unwelcome change. Only family and friends can help weather the unexpected that life brings.
Thirteen-year-old Blue Broen is on the hunt for a legendary ship of gold, lost centuries ago when her ancestors sailed to New York. Blue knows her overprotective parents won’t approve of her mission to find their family’s long-lost fortune, so she keeps it a secret from everyone except her constant companion, Otis, an 80-pound diabetic alert dog. But it’s hard to keep things quiet with rival treasure hunters on the loose, and with Blue’s reputation as the local poster child for a type 1 diabetes fundraiser.
Blue’s quest gets even harder when she’s forced to befriend Jules, the brainy but bratty daughter of a vacationing movie star who arrives on the scene and won’t leave Blue alone. While Blue initially resents getting stuck with this spoiled seventh-grade stranger, Jules soon proves Blue’s not the only one who knows about secrets — and adventure.
Will Blue unravel a three-hundred-year-old family mystery, learn to stand up for herself, and find the missing treasure? Or is she destined to be nothing more than “diabetes girl” forever?
Eleven-year-old Mabel Cunningham is a quiet loner who only feels free to be herself when she’s “extreme treasure hunting” with her grampa—much to her perfectionist mother’s disapproval. Nothing excites Mabel more than discovering a heart find, an item that calls to her heart, and the maybes that come along with it.
But when her friendships start to crumble and her grampa suffers a stroke, Mabel quickly learns that real-life maybes are harder to handle than imagined ones. Desperate to change things back to the way they were, Mabel devises a plan that she believes will fix everything. Except bringing her plan to fruition means lying to her grampa and disappointing her mother.
Will Mabel learn that letting go of the past doesn’t mean letting go of her grampa and that embracing the future might be one of her most important heart finds yet?
Those who seek treasure are often in the most desperate of circumstances. (The child-me who sought treasure in my brother’s room needed candy.) Unfortunately, Nura’s needs are much more dire. Buried treasure could change her family’s life—but at what cost?
Nura longs for the simple pleasure of many things—to wear a beautiful red dupatta or to bite into a sweet gulab. But with her mom hard at work in a run-down sweatshop and three younger siblings to feed, Nura must spend her days earning money by mica mining. But it’s not just the extra rupees in her pocket Nura is after. Local rumor says there’s buried treasure in the mine, and Nura knows that finding it could change the course of her family’s life forever.Her plan backfires when the mines collapse and four kids, including her best friend, Faisal, are claimed dead. Nura refuses to believe it and shovels her way through the dirt hoping to find him. Instead, she finds herself at the entrance to a strange world of purple skies and pink seas—a portal to the opulent realm of jinn, inhabited by the trickster creatures from her mother’s cautionary tales. Yet they aren’t nearly as treacherous as her mother made them out to be, because Nura is invited to a luxury jinn hotel, where she’s given everything she could ever imagine and more.
But there’s a dark truth lurking beneath all that glitter and gold, and when Nura crosses the owner’s son and is banished to the working quarters, she realizes she isn’t the only human who’s ended up in the hotel’s clutches. Faisal and the other missing children are there, too, and if Nura can’t find a way to help them all escape, they’ll be bound to work for the hotel forever.
When Juniper Harvey’s family moves to the middle of nowhere in Florida, her entire life is uprooted. As if that’s not bad enough, she keeps having dreams about an ancient-looking temple, a terrifying attack, and a mysterious girl who turns into an ivory statue. One night after a disastrous school dance, Juniper draws a portrait of the girl from her dreams and thinks, I wish you were here. The next morning, she wakes up to find the girl in her room…pointing a sword at her throat!
The unexpected visitor reveals herself as Galatea, a princess from a magical other world. One problem—her crown is missing, and she needs it in order to return home. Now, it’s up to Juniper to help find the crown, all while navigating a helpless crush on her new companion. And things go from bad to worse when a sinister force starts chasing after the crown too.
I feel like the name kind of says it all, but in case you’re unsure: this hilarious book is about a treasure-hunting family. The best part is, once your voracious treasure hunter finishes this book, there are several more treasure-filled books in the series!
The Kidd siblings have grown up diving down to shipwrecks and traveling the world, helping their famous parents recover everything from swords to gold doubloons from the bottom of the ocean. But when their parents disappear on the job, the kids are suddenly thrust into the biggest treasure hunt of their lives.They’ll have to work together to defeat dangerous pirates and dodge the hot pursuit of an evil treasure hunting rival, all while following cryptic clues to unravel the mystery of what really happened to their parents—and find out if they’re still alive.
For readers who love a classic treasure-hunting story—one with pirates and sunken loot—then Tintin has you covered! This classic graphic novel will captivate reluctant readers, treasure-hunter enthusiasts, and everyone in between!
Tintin and Captain Haddock set sail aboard the Sirius to find the sunken remains of the Unicorn ship and notorious pirate Red Rackham’s treasure. 
If Fergie’s words don’t convince you to read this wild and hilarious story about treasure and a mysterious book—written by the legendary Jules Verne—then I don’t know what will. (Did I mention the book is set in PARIS!)
Owen Godfrey is spending his summer in Paris studying science fiction writer Jules Verne, the brilliant mind behind Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea and Around the World in Eighty Days. When Owen and his new friends find what appears to be a dusty copy of Verne’s collected works in an old bookshop, they’re intrigued by the hidden codes written inside. As one clue leads to another, the trio gets swept up in an epic treasure hunt spanning the city—from the depths of the catacombs to the top of the Eiffel Tower, and by way of skateboard, boat, car, and even a hot air balloon! But they quickly realize they’re not the only ones searching for the hidden riches, and that there are others who will stop at nothing to get to them first.
This fast-paced larger-than-life adventure is filled with action, high stakes, and three friends who are dead set on cracking the Jules Verne mystery.
