Book Reviews

Charlotte’s Web, published on October 15, 1952, by Harper and Brothers, is a children’s novel by E.B. White, the American essayist who spent decades writing for The New Yorker and who co-wrote The Elements of Style with William Strunk Jr. The book’s illustrations, by Garth Williams, match the prose exactly: warm and precise and a…

There is a particular kind of picture book that does something more than tell a story. It holds something. It becomes a place a child can return to when the world feels unsteady, a place where the darkness they are experiencing finds acknowledgment and the possibility of light finds form. Rain Before Rainbows, written by…

The Phantom Tollbooth arrived in 1961 with almost no expectation behind it. Its author, Norton Juster, was an architect who had received a Ford Foundation grant to write a book about cities, then quietly abandoned that project in favor of something stranger and, as it turned out, far more lasting. His housemate, cartoonist Jules Feiffer,…