Love The Only Harmless Great Thing? Readers share 83 books like The Only Harmless Great Thing...

Another Newberry Medal winner, this book is unlike the rest because the terror doesn’t come from the supernatural. It’s from the cruelty of mankind and scientific testing on animals.

What I love about this book, and the movie made in the “nineteen hundreds”, is it respected the readers. It told us a frightening story and trusted us to be able to process it. Like all the books on this list, the authors didn’t treat us like kids. They treated us like readers, and that’s the best thing a writer can do for their fans.

The animals in Bennett’s graphic novel do not gain sentience gradually, nor is their experience hidden from the rest of the world. Instead, animals all over the globe one day “wake up” and begin to wage war on humanity, and each other, creating a state of upheaval that few can comprehend. It’s that boldness and sheer shock value that I found most appealing. Like all good stories about animals gaining sentience, this one toys with the idea that non-human intelligence is some sort of affront to the natural order. At the same time, the story is grounded in the love between 11-year-old Jesse and her dog Sandor, who has sworn to protect her on a perilous journey. I enjoyed bouncing back and forth between affection and horror. Maintaining that balance is no easy feat!

A childless couple adopts a chimpanzee named Looee, and you already know from reading that sentence that it will lead to trouble and heartbreak. After a few pages, I didn’t care. In McAdam’s skilled hands, the inevitable sadness doesn’t matter, because the delicately handled point of view perfectly captures a doomed creature trapped between two opposing identities. In contrast, we also meet Podo, an alpha chimp at a research facility seeking to test the intelligence of primates. Podo is fully ape, but he is turning into something more. Their paths soon join, taking them deeper into a gray area between human and animal that I had never seen rendered on the page so vividly before. 

Though there is a supernatural element to this story, it features a dog named Tomorrow who learns about the real world in the most mundane way possible: by hanging around too long, and experiencing the inevitable loss that we all face. After his master injects Tomorrow with an immortality elixir, the two are separated, and the dog waits over a century for his companion to return. Along the way, he witnesses historical events, while meeting animals who live the innocent life he once enjoyed. By the time Tomorrow resumes his search, he is a changed dog, a person in every sense of the word, though his identity remains rooted in loyalty and love. This book makes you wonder: can you hold onto those good things after life has chipped away at you for so long?

I don’t read very much fiction (although I want to read more!) but I thought it would be interesting to check out some novels where animals are main characters.

I read several, and this is the one I still think about all the time. The main character is a crow and although the book is a fantastical mytho-poetic adventure through time and space, it is also a wonderful exercise in cross-species empathy.

While you are reading, you really feel like you understand what it means to be a crow. It really stuck with me; I found it really rich and wondrous. 

Zucchini the ferret, born in the Bronx Zoo, leads a bleak life.

When he learns about the outside world, he yearns to escape—but when he does, it's straight into chaos.

I read Zucchini many times as a child and last read it in my 30s, and it's wonderfully more grimdark than I remember. Published in 1982, the book is 1980's-New-York gritty, and so are the hard adult lessons: fighting for your needs is full of risk; betrayal is common; love, compassion, and understanding are scarce; and idealism has an unsustainable cost.

But this makes the bits of joy that Zucchini wrests from the world all the more vivid. The story, like the world, is hard; but the story, like the world, has hope.

In Paul Galico's The Abandoned (copyright 1950), 8-year-old Peter is transformed into a kitten after a mysterious accident, befriends an older stray, and learns how to behave as a cat as he teaches his new friend about the occasional goodness in people.

I grew up with cats and was obsessed with all things feline, and I couldn't resist this story, in its charmingly British voice, that explained to the reader how to properly behave as one; nor, I imagine, could many other younger cat lovers if they knew about this book.

(Because it if happened to Peter, maybe it could happen to us, and we ought to read this how-to, to be prepared. You know… just in case.) 

Tom Shachtman's Beachmaster, in which the sea lion Daniel Au Fond becomes obsessed with deciphering the fragments of an ancient legend—or is it a key but semi-forgotten piece of sea lion oral history?—hit my young world in the midst of my own obsession with "The Cryptic Prophecy" fantasy trope.

Marine mammals are an uncommon choice for sentient animals in fantasy, and all this plus my own permanent obsession with exploration meant that the vast, literally ocean-crossing scale of this story, with its multiple and differing sentient animal cultures, made it irresistible.

Luckily for me, Beachmaster is actually the first book of a trilogy (followed by Wavebender and Driftwhistler), so this was only the beginning. (Consider this paragraph a vote for all 3.)

For generations, this book has been helping young readers turn their kitchens into laboratories. After introducing basic scientific concepts, kid chefs/scientists get to test scientific principles with edible results: beef jerky, cottage cheese, pudding, and more. Along the way, they learn that making a meringue is about denaturing protein and that mayonnaise is a simple emulsion. I love the way in which the text and illustrations pair to clearly allow readers to conclude that good cooks truly are good chemists.

I just adored reading about all the adventures of the curious little girl, Ada Marie Twist, in this book. A late bloomer, Ada Marie’s first word, “Why?” comes at the age of three. From that moment, her language takes off, filled mostly with questions about how things work. I can relate to Ada Marie because I used to ask a lot of questions as a kid, too. It drove my mother crazy.

My mom eventually bought me a book of questions, hoping it would refocus my energy, but the joke was on her because the book had no answers! Luckily, I had understanding teachers in school who allowed me to explore my curiosity about the world. Similarly, in the book, Ada Marie’s curiosity tests the patience of her parents. But they eventually come to recognize her potential as a budding scientist.

Ada Marie also has the support of her teacher,… show more.