This is the story of Harriet Welsh, daughter of wealthy New Yorkers and attendee of a snobbish private school, where she has banded together with two other misfits. Harriet’s particular oddity is her obssession with writing down everything, and with wanting to know everything, which leads her to spying on the lives of others. She… Read more Harriet the Spy (1964)
Ged (with a hard /g/) is born in a tiny village of goatherds on the mountainous island of Gont, where he shows early signs of tremendous magical power. Ged is proud, prickly, and ambitious. Instead of staying as an apprentice with the contempletive old wizard Ogion, the boy chooses to go to the wizarding school… Read more A Wizard of Earthsea (1967)
Most books feature ordinary children to whom unusual things happen, or perhaps a character who turns out to be extraordinary in a generic sort of way (they are the lost prince, or a witch, or have a gift of talking to animals or seeing ghosts). But these characters are usually not, in and of themselves,… Read more Books for Odd Children: A Wrinkle in Time (1962)
Like Snyder’s The Egypt Game, The Changeling concerns two girls who form a friendship around a system of imaginings. Martha is from a socially prominent, emotionally unexpressive family; Ivy is from a large, poor, dysfuntional family prone to petty crime. Neither girl fits in her own world, so they spend their time in a shared… Read more The Changeling (1970)
In 1967, newcomer E. L. Konigsburg published two of the best books of the 1960’s (and, astonishingly, both got Newbery awards/honors in the same year). The better-known of the two is From the Mixed Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler, but here we will consider the equally excellent, and completely different, Jennifer, Hecate, Macbeth,… Read more Jennifer, Hecate, Macbeth (1967)