The Best Lizard Books for Kids

A lizard is the reptile a child is most likely to meet in person. It is on the hot rock by the driveway, on the wall above the porch light, in the tank at the back of the classroom doing push-ups at nobody in particular. Get close and the specifications turn ridiculous: a tail that detaches on purpose and grows back, toes that hold onto glass, skin that changes color, a body that can sit perfectly still for an hour and then cross a wall before you finish blinking. Children take every bit of this completely seriously, which is the useful thing about lizard books — the biology is already strange enough to carry a story, so the story almost never has to exaggerate.

Drawing from Bookroo’s collection of lizard books, our editors chose twelve that cover the range: the real herpetologist who walked Komodo dragons through the London Zoo, the folktale gecko who finds water after the elephants give up, the readers that finally explain sticky toes and shed tails, and the novels where being a lizard at a human middle school is the entire problem. Start with the shortlist, then work down the age shelves — picture books for read-aloud and first nonfiction, chapter books and graphic novels for readers who have moved on to detective geckos and monitor lizards with a supervillain for a principal.