Would recommend trying Knex for the database and Bookshelf as an ORM on top of it (developed by same person). I'm using it with postgres, but supports SQLite, MySQL/MariaDB and Oracle (in alpha) too.
Very expressive promise-based API with bluebird
behind it, knex has a well documented and great command line tool for making migrations, seed files etc. Bookshelf uses backbone models and collections as an inspiration, including the .extend(..)
paradigm for inheritance, so picking it up is a breeze if you come from that world. So far, so good.