Book Reviews

Louisa May Alcott wrote Little Women quickly, reluctantly, and under pressure from her publisher. She didn’t think much of the idea at first: a novel for girls, following the domestic lives of sisters in New England. She submitted the first part in 1868, the book sold immediately and enthusiastically, and she produced the second part…

Roald Dahl published Fantastic Mr. Fox in 1970, and in the fifty-plus years since, it has become one of those children’s books that parents rediscover with as much pleasure as their kids. It is lean and fast, clocking in at fewer than a hundred pages, and it delivers exactly what it promises on the cover:…

Where the Wild Things Are arrived in November 1963, a forty-page picture book that changed what picture books could do and be. Maurice Sendak, a child of Brooklyn who spent much of his childhood ill in bed drawing comics and watching the world through apartment windows, wrote and illustrated the story of a boy named…