Like Matasha, my eleven-year-old heroine, I am the product of a big-city Midwestern 1970s childhood. I was a rabid reader who always felt that books made the world make more sense. Now as then, I am drawn to characters who are allowed to be complicated and to endings that don’t tie things up with a tidy bow. I believe “unlikeability” in fiction is a myth. I love children’s books that show kids thinking and feeling deeply.
I read this book over and over as a kid, and it became one of my primary inspirations when I wrote Matasha. Harriet is a twelve-year-old living in New York City who spies on her neighbors and then writes about them in a secret diary. Harriet isn’t “nice.” She’s observant and judgmental and feisty and expressive (boy, is she expressive), and author Louise Fitzhugh, bless her, thinks that’s just fine. Harriet learns a lesson about compassion at the end, but it isn’t a treacly one.
First published in 1974, a title in which Harriet M. Welsch, aspiring author, keeps a secret journal in which she records her thoughts about strangers and friends alike, but when her friends find the notebook with all its revelations, Harriet becomes the victim of a hate campaign.
I discovered this book at age ten in a doctor’s office, waiting for my mother. It’s pure fun for younger kids, while older ones will start to catch onto its endless puns, jokes, and philosophical conundrums (in that way, it’s like Alice in Wonderland). Milo, a very ordinary boy, is whisked off into an adventure in Digitopolis and Dictionopolis, the warring kingdoms of numbers and words. There he discovers things like Subtraction Soup (the more you eat, the hungrier you get) and the land of Conclusions (which you get to by jumping). The Phantom Tollbooth will keep a curious kid’s mind busy and delighted for hours.
With almost 5 million copies sold 60 years after its original publication, generations of readers have now journeyed with Milo to the Lands Beyond in this beloved classic. Enriched by Jules Feiffer’s splendid illustrations, the wit, wisdom, and wordplay of Norton Juster’s offbeat fantasy are as beguiling as ever.
“Comes up bright and new every time I read it . . . it will continue to charm and delight for a very long time yet. And teach us some wisdom, too.” --Phillip Pullman
For Milo, everything’s a bore. When a tollbooth mysteriously appears in his room, he drives through only…
This classic about Fern, a girl growing up on a farm; Wilbur, the piglet runt she saves from the axe; and Charlotte, the wise spider who saves Wilbur again once he’s grown, is unsparing about the realities of the life cycle: creatures live and then—at some point—they die. Death is a unique loss and true cause for grief, and yet new life emerges in its wake. Crisply written and full of the feeling of rural life, it’s one of the first books I remember crying over.
Puffin Classics: the definitive collection of timeless stories, for every child.
On foggy mornings, Charlotte's web was truly a thing of beauty . Even Lurvy, who wasn't particularly interested in beauty, noticed the web when he came with the pig's breakfast. And then he took another look and he saw something that made him set his pail down. There, in the centre of the web, neatly woven in block letters, was a message. It said: SOME PIG!
This is the story of a little girl named Fern, who loves a little pig named Wilbur - and of Wilbur's dear friend,…
Many bookworms report that they identified with tomboy, scribbling Jo when they read Little Women as children, but I didn’t. I wanted to be Meg, the pretty and sensible one. The good thing is there’s no wrong March sister to identify with. They each represent very different but equally valid ways of managing the challenges of growing up. And for the sisters, there are many challenges: an absent father, strapped finances, and the eventual premature, heartbreaking death of one of them. Little Women doesn’t play down life’s difficulties but also shows family and friendship and love in all its richness.
Louisa May Alcott shares the innocence of girlhood in this classic coming of age story about four sisters-Meg, Jo, Beth, and Amy.
In picturesque nineteenth-century New England, tomboyish Jo, beautiful Meg, fragile Beth, and romantic Amy are responsible for keeping a home while their father is off to war. At the same time, they must come to terms with their individual personalities-and make the transition from girlhood to womanhood. It can all be quite a challenge. But the March sisters, however different, are nurtured by their wise and beloved Marmee, bound by their love for each other and the feminine…
An elderly man goes in search of a cat to make him and his wife less lonely. He comes home with not one but millions of them: how to choose which to keep? The cats solve the problem by fighting among themselves until “they must have eaten each other all up.” But one unexpected little kitten is left….
I couldn’t have articulated this when I first sat raptly turning its pages, but Ga’g’s fable, with its handwritten text and charming 1928 black-and-white drawings, acknowledges both the ferocious and the vulnerable in children’s natures.
An American classic with a refrain that millions of kids love to chant: Hundreds of cats, thousands of cats, millions and billions and trillions of cats.
Once upon a time there was an old man and an old woman who were very lonely. They decided to get a cat, but when the old man went out searching, he found not one cat, but millions and billions and trillions of cats! Unable to decide which one would be the best pet, he brought them all home.
How the old couple came to have just one cat to call their own is…
It’s 1970s Chicago. At the start of sixth grade, Matasha Wax has a best friend who is blowing her off, parents fighting over whether to adopt another child, and the possibility of needing growth hormone shots (she can’t seem to grow past four-foot-four). But none of these difficulties can prepare her for her mother’s sudden disappearance, a puzzle Matasha has to figure out all by herself. Matasha is a poignant look at resilience in the face of childhood loneliness, divorce, bullying, and slow development.
