Yes, children’s books in Chinese are typically much harder than most learners assume! It gets worse very quickly, too, so books aimed at middle school students are actually quite challenging!

You can try duchinese.net.

They offer short articles and stories in five levels: newbie through advanced. Some of the stories are premium, which means you have to pay, but there are plenty of free stories/articles. They have some really great features: you can choose between traditional and simplified characters, you can choose whether or not to show the Pinyin above the characters, and if you hover over a character or phrase, a pop up dictionary will tell you its pronunciation and meaning.

The other good feature is that after you read a story, you can choose for the app to test you, and to make flash cards on the new characters/phrases.

The only downside, for me, is that the advanced level is still an adaptation from a primary source rather than an excerpt from a real source. But if you are looking for graded readers, I think duchinese is a good resource.

What’s your current level? You need a solid foundation in the language before you even think about native-level content, especially literature of any kind. There are two articles about wuxia here on the site.

The first Chinese book ever I managed to finish was an Agatha Christie book. I knew the main characters, and since it’s a detective story I kept reading because of the suspense. Though I think translated books can be quite hard to read, since the language quite often doesn’t follow the flow of the Chinese language and the names are a pain to keep track of.

I also recommend the book 城南旧事 by author Lin Haiyin. It’s written in a very naive, childish language, which makes it an easy read, but the subject of the book is quite difficult, so it’s very rewarding in that way.

Now I’m trying to get into Internet novels. I’ve been reading 双城 by author 苍月. It’s an epic fantasy story. It’s quite exciting since I get the same feel as when I was a teenager just discovering fantasy books, at the same time it’s very challenging since a lot of words are related to magic and hard to find translations of.