Category: Young adult/children’s

24 Hours follows Ellis, who’s 17 and just back from boarding school, over the course of a day-long period that turns out to have a lot more adventure and drama in it than expected. When Ellis runs into a former classmate (Jackie, who’s a little older, but isn’t a university student and doesn’t have a…

At the start of this book, which is set in the summer of 1968, Delphine, Vonetta, and Fern Gaither (who are eleven, nine, and seven) are on their first airplane ride: they’re en route to visit their mother in California. Their mom, Cecile, left them when Delphine was only four and Fern was only a…

Gone-Away Lake is such a great summer read, with the same kind of vacation-delight feeling as books like Jeanne Birdsall’s “Penderwicks” series, though Gone-Away Lake predates those by several decades. Portia and her younger brother Foster always go to visit their cousin Julian and their Aunt Hilda and Uncle Jake in the summertime, but the…

Until recently I’d never heard of Johnny Gruelle (who created Raggedy Ann) or The Magical Land of Noom, but this kids’ book from 1922 was a cute/fun read. At the start, we meet Johnny and his sister Janey, who decide to use the boards left over from the chicken coop their grandfather just built to…

I definitely read The Secret Garden when I was a kid, but I’m not sure if I read A Little Princess or not: reading it now, for what may or may not have been the first time, the very beginning seemed very familiar to me, so I wonder if I started it but didn’t finish,…

Even though I was a kid who loved books, horses, and books about horses, I somehow never read Black Beauty when I was a child. I’m pretty sure I started it and didn’t finish, and I can’t remember why: maybe I tried it when I was a little too young, or maybe I was put…

In this third and final installment of Nesbit’s “psammead” books, the siblings from the first two are reunited, in very different circumstances, with the sand fairy they met in the countryside. The psammead tells the kids about a magic amulet, which they end up buying from a shop described like this: “It had all sorts…

Some months after the summer adventures of Five Children and It, the siblings from that book find themselves back home in London in gloomy November weather, wishing for something exciting to happen. And excitement arrives, in the form of a mysterious egg that turns out to hatch the Phoenix, and a magic carpet that will…

Though the chapters about the “gipsies” and the “Red Indians” are a bit squirm-inducing, I find this book really delightful overall and am always happy when I re-read it. Four children and their baby brother head to a country house in the summer; their parents are both called away suddenly, leaving the kids on their…

Terrible, Horrible Edie is the third in E.C. Spykman’s quartet of children’s books about the Cares family, but it works as a standalone—which is good, because the other three books are out of print. This was a delightful read though: I love it in the same way I love Elizabeth Enright’s “Melendy” books or Jeanne…