Children’s literature is the early foundation for our imagination, understanding of others, and the way we approach the world. I can still remember my mother reading to me and thinking how badly I wanted to learn how to read myself. My father would talk about the importance of an excellent vocabulary and discuss interesting words we came across. My grandmother, a teacher, taught me to read, and my grandfather, a historian, took me to the public library on a weekly basis every summer when I would come to visit them. I would enter endless worlds: ones that strongly echoed my own and others that could have been set in different universes but still rang true. So here are some recommendations to make children’s lives infinitely richer. There is no way for me to list all my favorites in this amount of space, so I will suggest a few that come to mind and some new ones that have crossed my path of late.

For very young readers, Dr. Seuss is always a good place to start. Dr. Seuss’s ABC: An Amazing Alphabet Book is a delight, like most of his colorful and whimsical works. I cannot think of a better way to learn the alphabet. The Cat in the Hat starts children learning poetry and its techniques on a very basic level. What also makes Dr. Seuss great is the way he makes serious points in a charming, seemingly nonsensical way, whether he is talking about the generous spirit of Christmas in The Grinch Who Stole Christmas, or the importance of conserving the environment in The Lorax. He truly embodies Oscar Wilde’s quotation that “Life is too important to be taken seriously.”

An adorable, classic work for children from four to six is Arnold Lobel’s Caldecott Honor Book, Frog and Toad Are Friends. When I read it first as an adult, I laughed out loud, because the concepts still apply. This book presents a very good friendship between different personalities. Frog and Toad enjoy each other, indulge and endure each other’s idiosyncrasies, and help the other when necessary. Recently I read T.R. Winn’s novel in a similar vein, a sweet and meaningful story called Daphne: The Misadventures of a Canada Goose. This local Alexandria author’s book features a gander improbably named Daphne and his friends of many species who team up despite their differences to save a child named Terry who is lost in the wilderness. This work for somewhat older children showcases the importance of harmony, acceptance, and coexistence among humans and animals, despite humans’ often negative effect on the environment.

For me, no greater adventures existed when I was young than C.S. Lewis’s seven books in The Chronicles of Narnia and J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit and his The Lord of the Rings trilogy.  C.S. Lewis created a world tinged with Greek and Roman mythology that is a gorgeous and joyful Christian parable, one accessible and meaningful to those of any religious background. When his counterpart and close friend, J.R.R. Tolkien, also an Oxford scholar, wrote The Hobbit for his children, he began to craft a world that was as real in some ways as this one, with a history, mythology, geography and even its own detailed languages inspired by early English and Norse influences. These two writers are the ones I encountered as a child who most made me suspend disbelief. Lewis’s books and The Hobbit are appropriate for readers of seven or over, while Tolkien’s follow-up to The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings, is an increasingly complicated, beautiful and often frighteningly dark trilogy that absolutely captivates precocious pre-teens, teens, and their parents. It is profound because it is so piercingly truthful.

In recent years, the Harry Potter juggernaut, an appealing and all-encompassing series for children and adults to read together, overshadowed a brilliant set of books for precocious children and pre-teens that was also published sequentially at a similar time. Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials, named after a phrase from John Milton’s Paradise Lost, comprises The Golden Compass, The Subtle Knife, and The Amber Spyglass. Critically acclaimed and the winner of multiple awards, they depict the clash and convergence of parallel and overlapping worlds that are sometimes funhouse mirrors of our own. These novels are very accessible because of their imperfect child heroes, Lyra and Will; intriguing adventures; and complex but comprehensible adult humans, witches, and angels who struggle with the ideas of physics, good and evil. Pullman has created a trilogy that will inevitably come to share the status of the classic fantasy works I mentioned above, despite his ideas being condemned by the Catholic Church as veiled critiques of practices and philosophies in institutionalized Christianity. Interested teens and adults will also want to ponder his fascinating and heartwrenching ideas and metaphors, while some will accept the books simply as a superb and exciting read.

It can be difficult to get active youngsters to crack any books during the summer, but even nonreaders will be intrigued by stories of survival, adventure, and the coming of age that is often accompanied by struggles with difficult emotions. Gary Paulsen’s Newbery Honor book, Hatchet, features a teenage boy named Brian whose parents are divorcing. When he flies in a bush plane to join his father for the summer in the Canadian wilderness, the pilot dies from a heart attack, and he must land the plane alone on a lake in the wilderness. Furious at his parents’ split and armed only with a hatchet given to him by his mother, he learns self-reliance, independence and how to carve out an existence in the deep woods. A novel close to my heart from childhood, the Newbery Medal winner Call It Courage by Armstrong Sperry, tells a somewhat similar story of a twelve-year-old Polynesian boy named Mafatu, who is terrified of the sea despite his name, which means “Stout Heart.” Deeply ashamed and determined to show his father his worth, he sets out in an outrigger canoe accompanied only by his pet dog and albatross to face his greatest fear, and discovers his ability to flourish and survive on an uninhabited island visited by cannibals.

One lighthearted and humorous recent publication written partially in cartoon form is Diary of a Wimpy Kid. Appealing to nonreaders and readers alike, Jeff Kinney’s story of a middle school boy named Greg is a very funny, realistic work that will tickle boys in particular. Greg complains about and draws pictures of his classmates, silly girls who ignore him, annoying older and younger brothers, and his exasperating existence at school.

To end on a completely different note, I will mention a standout that I came across when I was eight or nine, although it can be read by pre-teens as well. A Little Princess by Frances Hodgson Burnett is the story of Sara, a very wealthy, intelligent girl seen as a status symbol who enhances her British Victorian boarding school’s reputation. When her beloved father, her only living relative, dies working in India and loses all his money, the iron-hearted head of the school turns her into a half-starved and overworked scullery maid and tutor to earn her keep. Once called a little princess disparagingly by classmates and staff who then do not know how to handle her fall from favor, the sensitive, proud Sara decides that she will act with grace, charity, and kindness as a “princess” should and would, no matter how little money she has or how many hardships undermine her. This novel’s resolution never fails to overcome me.

So I have not lived up to my goal of making these reviews short, but I hope they are sweet. I also hope you have found some books worth every minute of the time you and the children in your life spend with them.

 

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