Children's

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…

In 1930, in the wealthy ranch country of Aguascalientes, Mexico, a girl named Esperanza Ortega is days away from her thirteenth birthday and a life she has never had reason to question. Her father owns the land. The servants love her family. The harvest is good. Then, overnight, everything her family has built is taken…

There is a certain kind of book that earns its emotional weight before the story even begins. The Legend of L’il Red is one of those books, and its origin story is worth knowing. Zachary Richard, the Louisiana singer-songwriter and poet who has spent five decades as a custodian of Acadian and Cajun culture, wrote…

Jean Craighead George published Julie of the Wolves in 1972, and it won the Newbery Medal the following year. George was 52 when the book came out, already the author of more than a dozen nature books for children, and she had been studying wolves and arctic ecology for years. That preparation is visible on…