There is something amounting to a trend of adult literary authors who put out a single book for children. It’s a bit like a ballet dancer getting on a unicycle; the results can be hard to watch. Let’s start with The Little Prince. * * * * * * * Saint-Exupery was a French aristocrat… Read more The Little Prince (1943)
– Part I – Charlotte’s Web (1952, E. B. White) Fern, daughter of Maine farmers, won’t let her father kill the smallest piglet. Instead she adopts it, names it Wilbur, and feeds it from a baby bottle. But Fern doesn’t get to keep Wilbur; instead he goes to her uncle’s farm to be raised for… Read more The Dog Dies, Part II: Charlotte’s Web
What a lovely, sun-drenched, quirky book this is. The Moomins and their extended family (including Sniff, Snufkin, two Snorks, a Hemulin, and a Muskrat) spend an enchanted spring and summer having adventures, complicated by a magician’s hat that changes things into other things. No description of those adventures could do them justice. I will just… Read more Finn Family Moomintroll (1948)
By the author of Pippi Longstocking but in a very different vein, this book shamelessly hits every cliche and yet manages to be one-of-a-kind. Bill Bergson lives in a safe little village but dreams of catching criminals in the big city. He is steeped in the blood-and-thunder idioms of murder mysteries and gangster movies, and… Read more Bill Bergson, Master Detective (1946)
The story is a simple one, of a dragon who is a retiring and literary sort, befriended by a boy and then challenged to a fight by Saint George (at the behest of the villagers, who love fights). Between them, the boy, knight, and dragon arrange a staged battle, after which the dragon becomes a… Read more The Reluctant Dragon (1898)
“Go to the library and pick out a book with an award sticker and a dog on the cover. Trust me, that dog is going down.” – Gordon Korman, No More Dead Dogs This is such a cliché, there is even a list on the Goodreads website called “The dog dies . . .… Read more The Dog Dies, Part I
The S.R.S.C. (Society for the Removal of Superfluous Children) has established a colony for children unwanted by their parents, at Watkyns Bay which cannot be reached from the ordinary world unless you know how. (The one exception is a cursed boatful of 17th century Dutch sailors.) There, the children live a life of play and… Read more The Marvellous Land of Snergs (1927)
There is a boy. He lives in a small midwestern town in the mid-20th century, and he is on a campaign to be allowed a dog. He is self-reliant and enterprising, and likes to tinker with inventions. His name is Henry or Homer. This is not a genre exactly, but more like a family, whose… Read more An Inventive, Animal-Loving, Small-Town Boy Whose Name Begins With H
In honor of the Laura Ingalls Wilder Award being renamed, I’m moving my discussion of the Little House books forward in the queue. There is a whole genre of semi-autobiographical books reflecting back on the era between the Civil War and WWI. (More on this in another post.) The giant of the genre, of… Read more The Little House Books: A Historical Slap Upside the Head
My generation grew up on James and the Giant Peach and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory; later generations grew up on Matilda and The Big Friendly Giant. Somewhere in the middle is a forgotten book that is arguably Roald Dahl’s best: Danny the Champion of the World. It tells the story of a boy and… Read more Danny the Champion of the World (1975)