Children's literature for a German learner

I feel like I've been here before.

My 12-year old daughter enjoys German at school, but her elder sister's Harry Potter und der Stein der Weisen and Die Tribute von Panem are beyond her.

I'm getting her copies of Mein Esel Benjamin and Emil und die Detektive. What would members suggest to cross the bridge from school German to something like her reading age in German? Preferably German originals rather than translations, and preferably leisure reading rather than graded readers.

I'm probably going to be dependent on what's available on ebay.de

It's over 40 years since I failed GCE O-level German. I'll be interested to see if I can manage Mein Esel Benjamin.

Many thanks.

Emil is certainly a good choice. I have good memories of (not) reading that on German trains as a teenager. I was trying to learn German at a Goethe Institut, but travelled on weekends. I was often in train compartments with families, and when I pulled it to read, the children would giggle, and I would explain, 'Ich lerne Deutsch. Das kann ich verstehen.' Then I would end up talking with the children and their parents. Much better practice than the book.

Thienemann has put out some very good collections of stories. Ich lese selbst! Ich kann lesen! Jetzt lese ich! Ich lese gern! They are quite affordable on Amazon.co.uk, and are full of a variety of easy stories. For your daughter these have the advantage that they don't look like baby books. On the other hand the individual stories are fairly short. Note that they are listed with a contributor (often Michael Ende) as primary author because no editor is listed.

Hmm...it's been a long time since I was looking for easy reading in German and I'm trying to remember what I read at the time (probably a lot of classics, both out of personal inclination and because that's what I could get my hands on, but I don't necessarily recommend that!)

We read bits of Max und Moritz by Wilhelm Busch in German class; also an adapted version of Kästner's Drei Männer im Schnee.

I also want to recommend some of the folklore about Tyl Eulenspiegel (I think there may be a version by Kästner even). He's a trickster character, so very different than Grimm's fairy tales, but fun, and the language hopefully isn't too difficult.

I'm afraid I'm not up on current children's writers--Cornelia Funke comes to mind, as does Michael Ende, but I'm not entirely sure whether something like Momo would be that much easier than Harry Potter language-wise. (I do wholeheartedly recommend the film version of Momo, however!)

Rafik Schami has written some collections of modern-day fairy tales which are often quite tongue-in-cheek and draw on his experience being a Syrian immigrant in Germany. Jakob Arjouni also ha a short collection called Idioten: Fünf Märchen about how people who are granted the fulfillment of a wish never ask for what they actually need. He's written some detective stories, too, which as far as I recall are easy-ish stylistically.

Daniel Glattauer's Gut gegen Nordwind is a romance told in the form of e-mails. The style is very conversational, so not super complex. I don't recall it being over heavy in colloquialisms.

Wladimer Kaminer's Russendisko might also be worth a look. He writes about Russian immigrants in Berlin, also fairly light-hearted, although I suspect more anecdotal and not so heavy on plot, if that is something that is important to her.

This site has a number of easy/adapted stories: http://www.easyreaders.eu/german.aspx If these are too easy, some of the titles might be suitable for reading in an unadapted version.