Book Reviews

Robert C. O’Brien published Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH in 1971 to relatively little fanfare, and then it won the Newbery Medal the following year and became one of the most widely loved children’s books ever written. O’Brien, whose real name was Robert Leslie Conly, died in 1973 and never saw how far…

Kenneth Grahame published The Wind in the Willows in 1908, and it has not stopped delighting readers since. Grahame was a senior official at the Bank of England who had been telling bedtime stories to his young son Alastair, and those stories became the foundation for this book. What he produced was something genuinely unusual:…

Jean Craighead George published My Side of the Mountain in 1959, and it arrived at a particular moment. The postwar suburban expansion was pushing American families further from the natural world, and anxieties about what that meant for children were beginning to surface in the culture. George’s response was direct. She wrote a book about…

Elizabeth George Speare published The Witch of Blackbird Pond in 1958, and it won the Newbery Medal the following year. The book has stayed in print, in classrooms, and on recommended reading lists ever since, which is either a tribute to its lasting power or a sign that curriculum committees are conservative. Having read it…

Harriet the Spy opens in the middle of a routine that Harriet Welsch has refined to an art form. She is eleven years old, she lives in a comfortable house on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, and every day after school she takes what she calls her “spy route”: a circuit through the neighborhood…