My kids love The Incredibly Dead Pets of Rex Dexter, which except for Rex seeing ghosts is very much of this world. However, he had to maneuver through a zoo and very rare animals dying, plus he got a chicken for his birthday at the beginning of a book.

While the chicken did die quickly, he was trying to care for it. As the menagerie grew, he had to juggle the ghosts with school and the mystery unfolding.

1. identify rare animals near extinction
2. create someone who wanted to get rid of them all
3. give enough tools to a 12 year old to solve the mystery and stop more of them from dying.


Also, Ann Patchett's Run,
Rules for a lone black child in a hospital when her mother is dying.
Car accident in the snow to injure one person badly.
Figuring out how to let a ten year old girl run around a university track
Woven family and religious history about a Virgin Mary sculpture that passes down through the first daughter of the family.
White parents adopted black children and there was some exchange of information, so there was research about adoption in the time when those children were born and raised. Their mother knew where they were. And she had not officially adopted her friend's child when her friend passed, so this kid somehow slipped through a lot of things. but the rules are different for white folks and black folks within this book, as well as in our real world. That had to take research and many definitions to figure out how to navigate that properly.