Oh gosh - it’s more of a YA, but I reread The Blue Sword regularly. It reminds me soooo much of my childhood and in particular the two years we were in Hargeisa, Somalia. The landscape was the same, the people were the same. And at the time it was one of the few non-Tolkienesque fantasies.
S1 rereads Tamora Pierce’s books on a regular basis.
One book I read on my kids’ recommendation was The House of the Scorpian, by Nancy Farmer.
It’s written as a YA style book but addresses big issues like human cloning and political conspiracies.
Very well written.
Madeline LEngle’s Austin Family books, especially The Moon by Night. Mitch and Amy, Takes of a Fourth Grade Nothing. Are you There God, It’s Me Margaret, The Outsiders, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, From The Mixed Up Files…
Just as now I had interest in stories of real people doing mostly real things. Fantasy did and does leave me cold.
I don’t believe anyone has mentioned “Johnny Tremain” by Esther Forbes, and it is not on that top-100 list posted at #129. It’s my own favorite for a kid about age 13 or so. It won some prizes when it came out in the early forties, and it hasn’t been completely forgotten - the fine American fiction writer, George Saunders, has singled it out for its impact on him as a kid. What I most remember about it is the intense interior life of the young protagonist, an orphan boy severely injured in an accident in Paul Revere’s silver shop, who must fight his own personal battle to make sense of his life while also participating in the big public events of the times. It stirred in me for the first time the idea that life is a struggle to master oneself as well as external events. That’s a bracing thing to learn from a book.
I reread Johnny Tremaim as an adult, I liked the first part, but eventually got bogged down/bored. I thought I’d enjoy it more because I understand that period of our history better as an adult, but it is one that didn’t hold up for me as an adult.
Though it’s a animated video series and not a book, my kids and I watched the “Liberty’s Kid’s” a historical fiction drama about the Revolutionary war period…three times…all the way through
(40 episodes)
One of the benefits of homeschooling during the elementary years.
A few posters have mentioned Paul Gallico. My favorite all time book is The Abandoned, I reread it numerous times when I was young and cried every time. I had another book of his with 3 short novels, one of which was the Snow Goose that I read many times.
I love the moniker Orphan Romance!, I loved those books, the Little Princess, Anne of GGs, James and the Giant Peach, the Little Witch and have loved and reread Harry Potter as well.
Loved many of the books that have been mentioned here- the Little House Books, Narnia, Mrs. Piggle Wiggle.
I enjoyed and discovered many books along with my kids- HP, the Red Wall series, a Single Shard, the Giver
A couple I enjoyed and read when I was young were The Pushcart Wars and White Patch the Ant.
I’m going to have to peruse this thread and start reading some of the books I’ve either heard of and never got around to reading or new ones I’ve never heard of!!
I read Johnny Tremaine as a kid, and then again as an adult when I read it to my kids. I liked it much more as an adult. It was an assigned book in school in 7th grade and frankly, at that point, I no longer had any interest in books that were written for children, even if you call them “young adults.” When I read it to my children, who were much younger than 12 at the time, I was impressed by how much subtlety there was, and how effective the book was at communicating aspects of life that were very different for an American kid in colonial times vs. late 20th Century. There was lots to discuss with my kids about the book. But it’s not one I would return to on my own.
Does anyone remember a long-lost series of books for under-12’s which consisted of depictions of kids of similar age who would some day achieve fame and fortune? The books purported to be brief bio’s but usually focussed on a single incident of unknown authenticity in which the kid was shown as a bit of a scamp doing eccentric things that got him (usually him, of course) no credit at all but were very much connected with what would one day make the adult version of the kid famous. The choice of subjects was a bit eccentric. The ones I remember were William Penn, Sam Wanamaker, George Washington Carver, Robert Fulton and (gasp) Nathan Bedford Forrest. The books had dull orange covers and the titles characterized the subjects, such as “Friendly Boy” for William Penn. All the figures were American. The last chapter always gave us a vignette of the subject in his glory as an adult. The implicit moral was: this famous guy was once a kid like you, who no one believed in, but look what his pluck and derring-do actually achieved in the face of the adult obstacles placed before him. You could do that too… I won’t claim much for the literary value of these books, but the memory of them does make me nostalgic. They are quintessential Americana of a vanished past, not far removed from the tales of Parson Weems or Horatio Alger.
@dragonmom3, our family loves Liberty Kids. Everyone knows the theme song by heart and my oldest two have watched the whole thing twice. D19 went back to certain episodes when she took APUSH!
@JHS , I meant to second your championing of “Stuart Little”. My children liked all the White books, but I myself preferred the tale of the plucky mouse-boy. That was White at his whimsical and inventive purest. There’s a touch of bathos in the tale of Charlotte - though kids like that touch of course.
@marlowe1 I don’t remember ever seeing the series you are talking about in #169, but I spent much of 2nd and 3rd grade obsessed by a series called the Landmark Books, which were nonfiction American and world history chapter books for young people.
Some were abridgments of adult books, like Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo. Some were biographies – I remember Marie Curie, George Armstrong Custer, Genghis Khan, Sun Yat Sen, Francis Marion, George Washington Carver, Hannibal, Junipero Serra, Florence Nightingale, and Abraham Lincoln. I read books about the Texas Rangers – the paramilitary force, not the baseball team – the Transcontinental Railroad, the FBI, the Secret Service, the Panama Canal, and the battles of Iwo Jima, Guadalcanal, and the Alamo.
Not all of them would have passed muster in the current day, but they were at least somewhat nuanced, and far from pabulum. I don’t know of anything remotely like that series at that reading level in the past 25 years.
I read a bunch of abridgements that the USIS library had when I was in fourth grade - they were made at different levels specifically for English language learners - the only one I remember is there was one either by or about John Muir.
In fifth grade I was at a different school and I think I read every single biography they had - there was one series that was either all or mostly sports biographies - Babe Didriksen, Sandy Koufax, Lou Gherig were all covered. It means that I am usually better than my husband when it comes to sports stuff in the crossword puzzle.
I was also a big fan of George Washington’s World and Abraham Lincoln’s World. They gave you snippets of events all across the globe - and included the childhood’s of various people who became famous.
My post above inspired me to do some research on Landmark Books.
It’s no accident that I loved them. They were a pet project of Bennett Cerf, the founder of Random House. By and large, they were written by successful – sometimes very successful – non-academic authors who did not otherwise write for children. For example, the book on Hitler and Nazi Germany was written by William Shirer, author of The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, Pearl Buck wrote the biography of Sun Yat Sen, C.S. Forester wrote a book on the Barbary Pirates, and the battle of Gettysburg was covered by MacKinlay Kantor, author of Andersonville. (I read all of those.) The biography of Robert E. Lee was written by future New Yorker stalwart George W. S. Trow at 24. Random House deliberately did not provide a style book to the authors, relying on them to decide how to address young readers. The series was enormously successful for a while; 180 books were published on Cerf’s watch.
The rights are now owned by Pearson’s Penguin Random House division, which has only a handful of books in print, 16 total, mainly biographies of American historical figures. The Lee book is still there, and Lincoln, George Washington, Jefferson, Martin Luther King. Some of the books are from the original series; most are written by professional children’s authors.
My first biography was a book about Mary McLeod Bethune I read in 2nd grade. I was really excited to discover this new genre and I found MMB, an educator and civil rights activist, inspiring. My choice did make things awkward when the teacher decided the entire class should dress up as our biography subjects for a special presentation. How do you turn a little white girl into a middle aged black woman without blackface and an afro wig? @-)