100 books like The Mitten

The Snowy Day is, at its heart, a beautiful book about playing alone.

When I was reading this book to my kids, we had just moved to the mountains of Ketchum, Idaho and my son had started third grade at a new school. He spent a lot of time playing alone in the snow and could relate to Peter’s solo adventures in the book.

The bright, graphic collage illustrations add a liveliness that reflects the joy of discovery, while the cool snow tones bring a silent reflectiveness. The book’s history is rich as well: It was published in 1963 and was the first color picture book to feature a black character.

As the book gently led readers into Jack’s quiet and joyful world, it was also a message of inclusiveness that broke through a wall in children’s publishing.

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.

Martin Cruz Smith’s first book in his Arkady Renko series, Gorky Park, did very well and was made into a successful film. Later books are perhaps not so well known which I think is a great pity. Smith’s books ooze atmosphere, intrigue, and authenticity taking us into other worlds—in this case, that of Russian oligarchs and the deadly exclusion zone round Chernobyl. Arkady Renko is an incorruptible investigator in a society where everyone is on the make—another parallel I’ve found very applicable to my own work. And, unlike many thriller authors, Smith is also a brilliant writer of scintillating, gripping narrative. I’d love David Hidalgo and Arkady Renko to meet and have a chat over a few glasses of red wine, vodka, or both!

In deeply personal terms, Father Desbois describes how his curiosity about his grandfather’s incarceration in Ukraine led him to study the atrocities committed there against the Jews. The book is written in an almost conversational style, creating a sense of intimacy between Father Desbois and the reader. Desbois is able to persuade those who witnessed atrocities to open up and confess what they have seen and what they remember. Together with a team of ballistic experts, interpreters, historians, and archaeologists, he identified numerous sites of mass graves. Desbois, who popularized the term “The Holocaust by Bullets,” has been instrumental in expanding our understanding of the Holocaust beyond the death camps and the ghettos to the more intimate killings that took place in Ukraine and elsewhere in the Soviet Union.

I’ve read this book several times and I don’t believe I ever manage to get through it without shedding a few tears. Have tissues handy. A Mennonite family living in Ukraine in the 1920s has their village destroyed by Russian soldiers. The central character, ten-year-old Peter Neufeld, makes a decision to help his older brother Otto escape after he’s participated in counter-attacks, going against the family’s adherence to passive resistance. The Neufelds decide to leave a land of oppression and move to Canada where they will make an effort to assimilate rather than live apart as they have in Ukraine. It’s a journey filled with challenges and heartbreak, but always with the strength of love of family and humanity as a sustaining factor.

This is the kind of novel that stays with you long after you finish reading it.

It shows how some individuals can survive even the worst circumstances if they possess tenacity, hope, and perhaps most importantly, the determination to work together as a group.

To the Edge of Sorrow is the story of a disparate group of Jewish partisans during World War Two who use whatever skills they possess to survive Nazi tyranny. This not only involves foraging for food or constructing temporary shelter. Some also devote themselves to spiritual and intellectual pursuits, despite their degraded circumstances.

I found it particularly inspiring to read about the strength and endurance of the Jewish spirit despite the attempt by the Nazi regime to obliterate the entirety of Jewish life in Europe.

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.

Nikolai Gogol – or, in Ukrainian, Mykola Hohol – is considered a classic of Russian literature.

At the same time, he was born Ukrainian, wrote about Ukraine, and is considered their own by many Ukrainian literature lovers. Literary scholar Edyta Bojanowska has written a fascinating study about how Gogol knew to draw upon both Ukrainian and Russian cultural repertoires to appeal to readers and how he intentionally played with his intimate knowledge of both cultures.

This was one of the studies that inspired me as I tried to understand the complex cultural entanglements between nineteenth-century Russia and Ukraine, as I found them personified in my books’ protagonists.