What order should kids read a book series in?
Some series fall apart if you read them out of order. Others don't care at all. Here's how to tell which one you're holding, plus the order for four of the most common series in a kid's collection.
“Which one comes next?” is a harder question than it sounds, because the honest answer depends entirely on which series you’re asking about. Some series are one long story cut into volumes. Others are a shelf of unrelated stories that happen to share a character or a format. Buying or borrowing the wrong one matters a lot for the first kind and not at all for the second.
The two kinds of series
Before looking up a specific title, it’s worth knowing which category you’re dealing with.
Continuous series
Characters age, relationships develop, and jokes or plot points from an earlier book get called back later. Reading book 9 before book 3 means missing context, and in graphic novel series especially, missing a running joke that pays off three books later. Dog Man and Junie B. Jones both work this way.
Anthology series
Each book is a self-contained story that shares a format, publisher, or theme, but not a plot. Nothing is lost by reading book 40 first. The Who Was?/Who Is? biographies are the clearest example: pick whichever person your kid is curious about.
Magic Tree House sits in between. Each mission is largely self-contained, so reading out of order won’t confuse the plot of that book, but Jack and Annie’s skills and the overarching Merlin storyline build gradually, so publication order still gives the fuller experience.
Dog Man, in order
A continuous series by Dav Pilkey. Reading in order matters here: the friendship between Dog Man, Petey, and Li’l Petey develops book to book, and later volumes assume you know how earlier plot threads resolved.
- Dog Man (2016)
- Dog Man: Unleashed (2017)
- Dog Man: A Tale of Two Kitties (2017)
- Dog Man and Cat Kid (2018)
- Dog Man: Lord of the Fleas (2018)
- Dog Man: Brawl of the Wild (2019)
- Dog Man: For Whom the Ball Rolls (2019)
- Dog Man: Fetch-22 (2019)
- Dog Man: Grime and Punishment (2020)
- Dog Man: Mothering Heights (2021)
- Dog Man: Twenty Thousand Fleas Under the Sea (2023)
- Dog Man: The Scarlet Shedder (2024)
- Dog Man: Big Jim Begins (2024)
- Dog Man: Big Jim Believes (2025)
Publisher release schedules shift, so check the copyright page or the publisher’s site for anything released after this was last updated.
Junie B. Jones, in order
Also continuous, and also worth reading in order: Junie B. moves from kindergarten to first grade partway through the series, makes new friends, and loses old jokes about being “the new kid,” all of which land better in sequence.
The series splits into two eras. The kindergarten books run from Junie B. Jones and the Stupid Smelly Bus (book 1) through book 17. The first-grade books pick up from book 18 onward. Total book counts vary by source depending on whether companion titles and later graphic-novel adaptations are counted alongside the original chapter books, so when it matters, check the number printed on the book’s spine or copyright page against your library or bookseller’s listing rather than trusting any single number as final.
Magic Tree House, in order
Jack and Annie’s missions are numbered from book 1, Dinosaurs Before Dark, onward. Each mission mostly stands alone as a story, so a child can enjoy book 14 without having read book 3. What builds across the series is Jack and Annie’s skills and the larger Merlin storyline that runs underneath the individual missions, so reading roughly in order gives the more rewarding experience even though it isn’t strictly required.
Total book counts you’ll see quoted online range from the mid-30s to over 60, because sources differ on whether they’re counting only the numbered main series or including the separate Merlin Missions spin-off line. Rather than repeat a number here that different retailers list differently, check the number on the spine of the book in hand.
Who Was? and Who Is?, no order needed
These biographies are anthology-style: each book covers one historical or living figure, from Marie Curie to LeBron James, and none of them reference each other. Pick based on who your kid is currently curious about, not by number. If you want to impose an order anyway, the only two options that make sense are publication order (which one came out first) or the subject’s own chronological order (who lived when), and neither changes anything about how the book reads.
Why this ends up being a duplicate-buying problem too
“Which one comes next” and “do we already have this one” are the same underlying problem: nobody standing in a bookshop can hold an entire series’ worth of spines in their head, especially not a grandparent buying for a series they don’t read themselves. The number on the spine tells you the order. It doesn’t tell you whether book 9 is already on the shelf at home.
That second question is the one Shelfmark answers: it catalogs a shelf from a photo, including the series and title of each book, and gives you a link to check before you buy the next one.
Spotted a series you’d like covered here, or a book count that’s changed since this was written? The reading order above is checked against publisher and retailer listings at time of writing, but series get new entries, so treat the spine of the actual book as the final word.