While children's book publishers are wringing their hands, wondering whether fourth-graders with their own Facebook profiles will ever find their way to the printed page, author Daniel Pinkwater is offering an ingenious plan that may show them the path. At his website (www.pinkwater.com), the NPR commentator and author of "about a hundred books, all but two or three of them good," has posted the first 25 chapters of his latest, "The Yggyssey: How Iggy Wondered What Happened to All the Ghosts, Found Out Where They Went, and Went There" (ages 10 and up, Houghton Mifflin, $16). The offering is free, and readers can sign up to receive an e-mail reminder about new chapter postings.

A sort of sequel to "The Neddiad" (which, classics students be warned, has almost nothing to do with Homer), "The Yggyssey" starts at the haunted Hermione Hotel in Los Angeles, home to such celebrity ghosts as Rudolph Valentino and the La Brea Tar Pit woman, and a girl named Yggdrasil Birnbaum, a student at the Harmonious Reality School, where regular attendance is not required. This leaves Iggy's schedule quite free to follow a ghost bunny through the portal of an alternate universe. Neddie and Seamus (also from "The Neddiad") accompany Iggy on a wild ride that includes a cast of strange characters (a girl with cat whiskers, gnomish hippies, a team of urban mountaineers who would rather rappel down a skyscraper than take the stairs), close brushes with a variety of fractured fairy tales and more coincidences than you'd find in a Dickens novel. Young readers may find particular pleasure in the author's penchant for twisting some of the conventions of children's lit. For instance, when a goodie-two-shoes witch in a party dress descends from the sky, half the crowd boos her for being so annoying and boring. Pinkwater's charming caper is anything but and, like the rest of these middle-grade novels, makes a compelling case for the future of kids' books, whether the platform is hardcover, Kindle, or whatever comes next.

It is worth remembering that Jeff Kinney's bestselling "Diary of a Wimpy Kid" series actually started on the Internet as a comic strip on funbrain.com, read by more than 70,000 kids a day before it became a five-part book series with a bazillion copies in print. The third installment, "Diary of a Wimpy Kid: The Last Straw" (ages 9 to 12, Amulet books, $12.95) finds self-centered seventh-grader Greg Heffley making New Year's resolutions for everyone around him, and remaining quite oblivious to the sarcasm in his mother's comment: "Everyone can't be as perfect as you, Gregory." While laundry is added to Greg's meager load of responsibility (resulting in several underpants-related humiliations), he continues to resist the usual character arc of children's novels, and seems in no danger of actually growing as a person.

The same cannot be said for Toby Lolness, the 1 1/2-millimeter-high hero of "Toby Alone" (ages 9 and up, Candlewick, $16.99), the debut novel of French playwright Timothée de Fombelle, which has already won awards in France, where it was first released. Lilliputian Toby faces Herculean hurdles after his scientist father discovers the secret to the great Tree his civilization calls home, and is disappeared by greedy developers. The flashback narrative style may be a challenge for younger readers, but older ones should get the slightly Orwellian slant of this eco-fable, which seems to borrow from the classic "The Borrowers," as well.

Developers are also cast as the bad guys, but to far more comic effect, in Carl Hiaasen's latest Florida eco-caper, "Scat" (ages 10 and up, Alfred A. Knopf Books for Young Readers, $16.99). When their terrifying biology teacher Mrs. Bunny Starch disappears on a field trip to the Black Vine Swamp (a sudden absence they refuse to accept as the "family emergency" the principal insists it was), Nick and Marta go on the prowl for clues. This fetid and funny Everglades plot terrain will be very familiar to readers who loved "Hoot" (a Newbery Honor Book) and "Flush," but there's a touching and unexpected subplot about Nick's father, a wounded Iraqi war veteran, whose son binds his own arm to share the burden of learning to live with only a left hand. Rounding out the cast is a stuffed rat, a bumbling oil prospector and a deeply annoyed panther.

Younger readers of the more Peter Rabbit-y persuasion may prefer "A Finder's Magic" (ages 4 to 8, Candlewick, $15.99) a gentle whodunit that feels more like a fairy tale. The last novel written by Philippa Pearce, the beloved British children's novelist who died in 2006, it's dedicated to her grandsons and illustrated by their other grandmother, Helen Craig, best known for her illustrations for "Angelina Ballerina." The story follows a boy named Till who can't find his dog and who gets help from a strangely elfin "finder" who can see into people's dreams -- but can he be trusted? Reading it aloud, you may find it hard not to slip into a British accent.

An early American accent comes leaping off the pages of "The Mostly True Adventures of Homer P. Figg" by Rodman Philbrick (ages 9-12, The Blue Sky Press, $16.99), a historical and often hysterical Civil War "memoir" in which the young narrator promises to transcribe the stories of "all the heroes and the cowards, and the saints and the scalawags, and them stained with the blood of innocents, and them touched by glory, and them that was lifted up to Heaven, and them that went to the Other Place." Orphan Homer chases after his older brother after their caretaker sells him to the Union Army, the two brothers eventually reuniting on the battlefield of Gettysburg. This fast-moving yet emotionally stirring novel would be a great way to introduce the themes of the Civil War to young readers and provides an excellent example of an entertainingly unreliable narrator.

Laura Billings is a writer in St. Paul.