Children's

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,…

Roald Dahl published Matilda in October 1988, three years before his death, and it is widely considered the finest novel he wrote for children. Published by Jonathan Cape in the UK and illustrated by Quentin Blake, it follows Matilda Wormwood, a girl of extraordinary intelligence born into an indifferent, frankly negligent family in a small…