Fans pick 100 books like The Mitten

I love snow! I love this book. The simple collage illustrations support a simple childhood experience that captures my childhood winter as much as it does the delight my grandchildren take in snow. I love that this is nature experienced in a city setting. It was a quiet day for making footprints in the snow, feet pointing out, and feet pointing in. The crunch, crunch, crunch, a stick just right for smacking snow-covered trees.

I want to climb into this book and be that child. And oh, the memories of a snow day, not a holiday but a day filled with magic like no other, a day to fully explore and enjoy the season, the natural world. The excitement I feel even now when snow falls at night, promising another snow day.

To me, this book has a great combination of sleepy and silly elements. The illustrations are warm and cozy, and throughout the book, Bear snores happily in the background.

My kids and I love that while Bear sleeps, a party starts forming in his cave. We love seeing the party grow until Bear wakes up to discover what’s going on.

This gem of a board book creates a quiet sense of joy as an adorable little Korean girl dons her white snowsuit and red scarf and sets out with her puppy to explore the newly soft and snowy landscape.

“Pat, pat, pat,” and “Roll, roll, roll,” she goes with her growing snowball past brown bears, forest animals, and polar bears, to a frozen lake where other children play, skate, and make snowmen, and, finally, into to a glorious fantasy scene that will have your kid in wonder!

The fresh, loose, mixed media illustrations created in shades of black and white, with a touch of red, evoke the quiet wonder of a snowy night. The illustrations are masterfully simple and focused, yet beautifully detailed backgrounds set the stage for this wondrous adventure.

When I was a kid, I loved books about miniature things; they piqued my imagination and had me thinking long after the story was finished.

The Victorian Era family of five living inside the snow globe is not only miniature but it has its own weather system—and it hasn’t snowed in a long time! The snow globe rests on the mantle of a “big house” with a mirrored human-sized family.

No one in the family remembers the snow globe except for Baby, who is left at home with Mama while everyone goes outside in the blizzard to play. Baby tips over the snow globe, giving the tiny family exactly what it has been waiting for; a blizzard! Now both families get to play in the snow and it’s ever so much fun! Wonderful for children of all ages.

These were an early read for me, and at 14 years old, I consumed every Flashman book I could find. Harry Flashman was the bully responsible for the abusive treatment of Tom in Tom Brown’s Schooldays, and I so wanted to see him get the fate he deserved. 

Flashman is a cad, a bully, a coward, and the worst sort of officer, but he always seems to turn up trumps—a phrase with strange resonance today. These meticulously researched novels—this one is set amidst the Charge of the Light Brigade - put Flashman in the worst of situations, only for him to cheat, lie, and bluff his way out. They taught me that heroes don’t always have to be noble or nice.

If you’ve ever found yourself obsessed with a family mystery, you’ll be captivated by The Lost. Mendelsohn had always wondered what happened to his great-uncle and aunt, and their four daughters, during the Holocaust. His search starts with ordinary genealogical curiosity but quickly spirals into an epic quest. I admire Mendelsohn’s elegant, lyrical prose and was swept up in his ruminations on what we owe the past. His discoveries are heartbreaking but they also spark hope—by rescuing one ordinary family from oblivion.

I loved this highly readable history of Ukraine. Written in the early 1990s, when I too worked in Ukraine, Borderland begins with the newly independent nation’s struggle to build itself a national identity. Reid captures this time and its people so well – the peasant women in the covered market, the old men playing chess in Independent Square. Ukraine is literally translated as, ‘on the edge’ or ‘borderland’ and Reid explores the toll of its history – pograms, famine, purges, war, Holocaust, and Chernobyl… She travels through villages of whitewashed cottages, bringing their hardy inhabitants to life with her often quirky observations. She meets old folk who were alive during the famine of 1932/33, others who survived the gas chambers. At every turn, the magnificent Ukrainian spirit is in vibrant evidence. 

Published in 2017, Words for War offers work by sixteen Ukrainian poets reacting to the earlier stage of the war there, translated by a number of poets and specialists.

Why is it important to get this kind of testimony to readers? The answer came in 2022—and the very various poems by writers young and old, women and men, in-country and émigrés, funny and tragic, give the reader both the vitamins of knowledge about the country and its people and the pleasures of beautiful, thought-provoking poetry about something you know is truly important.

Andrew Wilson is the foremost British historian of Ukraine. This book offers the most authoritative and readable single-volume history of Ukraine available in English.

Given the astonishing lack of knowledge about Ukraine, particularly evident in so much ‘expert’ commentary on the war, Wilson’s work is required reading for anyone wanting to understand what is happening today in Ukraine. The fifth edition takes the story up to the outbreak of the war and into the summer of 2022.

The author concludes that Putin’s war to destroy Ukraine has paradoxically helped Ukraine to overcome its internal divisions and transform itself into a genuine nation-state, supported by all sections of the population. 

Long before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022, Russia and pro-Russian forces tried to reclaim Ukraine through armed conflict after it declared independence in 1991. More than 500,000 people died in consecutive wars from 2014, among them Volodymyr Pavliv, a soldier in the Ukrainian Armed Forces who died of shrapnel wounds in 2017. His sister, Olesya Khromeychuk, a historian, scholar, and director of the Ukrainian Institute of London, narrates her brother’s death in this meditation on grief and war.

As a memoirist, she reveals the nuances of her brother, at once patriotic, brave, complicated, and difficult. Her reflections on his splintered life add color and humanity to a flawed yet loved brother. Her portrayal of her own and her family’s grief is tender and wrenching. However, given her unique stature as a Ukrainian historian, this most personal book about the human cost of war also serves as a study of… show more.