100 books like When Hitler Stole Pink Rabbit

Books offering support to parents have come on in leaps and bounds since the days when Gina Ford and Supernanny-style discipline reigned supreme. This book is my go-to book for practical advice.

Perry, a psychotherapist with more than 20 years of experience, is not interested in manipulating children’s behaviour with naughty steps and sticker charts. Her approach may incidentally help to get your children to brush their teeth and eat their vegetables, but her emphasis is on the far deeper and more important business of how to build a mutually respectful and cooperative relationship. Her voice is wise and refreshingly nonjudgmental.

This is one for parents who, in Perry’s words, "Not only love their children but want to like them, too”.

The idea of this book is so simple and so brilliant! What if war broke out, not in some faraway part of the world, but in your own home country? What if your house had been bombed, your sister injured, and your grandparents killed? What if you, a European teenager, had to flee with your family to a country in the Middle East, where you are barely tolerated and forced to live in poverty? 

On 64 pages, in a book the size and shape of a European Union passport, Danish writer Janne Teller makes the reader understand what it really means to be a refugee from war and persecution.

I just read this book—it’s been in my TBR pile since 2004—and it’s why I chose the theme of siblings. I loved the voice of this novel, the narrator’s young outsider perspective, her humour and heart—Daisy is such an unexpected character to tell a war story through. But what I loved most about the book is the sibling vibe in the house of her cousins. Edmond, Piper, Osbert, and Isaac—each of them is who she/he is because of their siblings. You could remove one from the plot (well, not Edmond!) but the others wouldn’t be themselves anymore. We feel that through Daisy’s thin bones: these people belong to each other, and maybe she could belong there too. 

"It was like living on a desert island. Instead of the sea, there were houses and people around me." Aleks, aged 11, uses a metaphor fetched from his favorite book, Robinson Crusoe, to describe his own struggle for survival. But his "island" is a ruined house in the ghetto, where he hides after having been separated from his father during a raid by the Nazis. Just as resourceful and inventive as his literary role model, Aleks manages to fend for himself while hoping for his father to return.

Uri Orlev, himself a survivor of the Warsaw ghetto and Bergen-Belsen, succeeds in combining a classic adventure story with a realistic narrative of the Holocaust. I don't know how he does it, but I know that his book is a masterpiece.

This is an exceptionally good middle grade book! It tells what really happened to British children who were evacuated from the cities to the countryside during WWII. It caused me to question my English grandparents about their experiences during WWII. Imagine how people would react today if the government ordered them to put their children on a train to go live with strangers in some other part of the country.

When dealing with difficult behaviour, it can help to understand how your kids’ early experiences may have influenced their emotional landscape.

Sue Gerhardt's book draws on recent developments in neuroscience and developmental psychology to explain how babies’ brains are formed. She shows us that our early, fumbling parental mistakes can have consequences that play out over a lifetime.

As a working parent, I found it a sobering read–Gerhardt pulls no punches about the potentially damaging impact of putting your one-year-old in nursery, for example. But ultimately, the book is so persuasive that it feels worth facing up to these tough questions. She also constructs a compelling case about the long-term social impact of a government’s failure to support parents.

Mindfulness is an essential tool when it comes to surviving family life under pressure. There are hundreds of books on this topic, but for a practical guide, I would first turn to this book by Maitreyabandhu.

The author is a senior teacher at the London Buddhist Centre; this eight-week course is steeped in ancient spiritual teachings but aimed squarely at modern, secular readers who are contending with complicated lives.

In my own precious novel-reading time, I have found myself turning to books that look frankly and fondly at familial imperfection.

This book by Miriam Toews follows Hattie, her 11-year-old niece Thebes, and her 15-year-old nephew Logan as they cross the US in a dilapidated camper van, looking for the kids’ father.

Toews combines comedy with proper heartbreak to remind us that, in a messed-up world, we are sustained by the love of our families–flaws and all.

Even those of us who are familiar with historical details of the Holocaust have a mostly generalized understanding of the fraught relationships between US-based Jews and Jews in Europe.

Bonelli uses primary source materials, mainly letters, to inform a very well-crafted narrative in service of educating American Jews about the travails of European Jewry and helps explain the older generation of Jews to an often-befuddled younger generation.

The coming of the Third Reich in 1933 left Klemperer, a cash-strapped Jewish scholar, without his teaching job in a German university, but somehow sheltered from the worst excesses of Nazism due to his marriage to an “Aryan” German woman. His diaries are a window to the daily life of a childless middle-aged couple that observes world-shaking events from close proximity, while worrying about debts and the high costs of keeping the family car, Klemperer's most cherished possession.