Category: Young adult/children’s

These two short books, both illustrated by Ruth Chrisman Gannett (the author’s stepmother) are so wonderful and charming. In the first, young Elmer Elevator runs away from home to free a young dragon from wild animals who are keeping him captive. In the second, Elmer and the dragon head back towards the town where Elmer…

Clever and funny and all-around wonderful, exciting and perfect for reading aloud. (The movie, while quite different from the book, is excellent as well.)

Such a charming story about three city children who move to the country with their mother when their father suddenly has to go away. Peter, Roberta, and Phyllis (the latter two known mostly as Bobbie and Phil) have various adventures in and around their small village: they befriend the stationmaster and the porter at the…

Charles Harrisong lives in Normal, Illinois, and feels like his family is weird beyond helping. It’s not even that his family is so weird, although his younger siblings can be loud, his mom is sometimes embarrassing, and his older sister is independent and quirky. It’s more that Charles is acutely aware of what lies behind…

Alcatraz, 1935, from the perspective of Moose, a twelve-year-old kid who’s living on the island because his dad’s an electrician there. Historical details (Al Capone’s mother’s visit to the island, the construction of the Golden Gate Bridge) and family drama (but not melodrama). Much of the book is about the narrator’s sister, Natalie, who’s autistic;…

Cooper ties everything up neatly, but in a way that’s satisfying, that isn’t too neat or totally predictable. She also nicely shifts the focus, at the end, to humanism: a world that’s determined less by fate than by choice, and somehow manages to make this ring true, despite the fact that the rest of the…

Welsh place-names, lessons in pronunciation, hills and lakes and grey mist. This book felt less sinister than some of the others in this series, perhaps because it’s more about preparation than open conflict between the Dark and Light, perhaps because there is more of High Magic in it, perhaps because the Grey King and his…

This book was written nearly a decade before the first manned space flight, three years before Sputnik was launched, at a time when space must have captured kids’ imaginations in a somewhat different way than it does now. The sense of possibility that fills this book makes it a pleasure to read, as do all…

Wonderfully fast-paced and filled with plot twists, from curses to potions to romantic entanglements.

Back to Trewissick, to fish and the sea, history & tradition. In this book, Jane made me think of Chihiro in Spirited Away—both girls know to treat things-of-magic with kindness as well as respect, and it’s somehow really pleasing to watch a character engage with the world that way.