Whether reading them for the first time or revisiting familiar territory, all 5 of these books are engaging and heartfelt reading experiences that still speak powerfully to the lives of grown-ups. If you are a fan of serious literature, these offer a similar experience, just shorter and more tightly-woven. If you are a parent of young kids and experiencing kids’ stuff overload, these books will still satisfy you. You react to them as a whole person rather than with just the caregiver aspect of you.
We Are Condescending, Unimpressed Little Weirdos When We Talk About Children’s Books
During my master’s degree in children’s literature, the initial digging around to get a start on research papers always held interesting surprises. There were gaps in coverage in odd places. Don’t get me wrong, no area of literature has ever been completely and utterly uncovered. But, in my line of work there were bald spots everywhere.
Some books like Little Women and the Harry Potter series got extensive coverage. On the other hand, household names like Old Yeller or Where the Red Fern Grows got basically no coverage.
It was like one lone ant would find a crumb of literary criticism to work around and call over the friends. I’ve even met in person some of these pioneering ants ushering their friends to lunch alongside them.
If I was using a database or library search engine, I’d keep on coming across the same sort of fluff. Strange fluff—but fluff, nonetheless.
If a book or article started out with a cheesy, lengthy “kids books are great and worthwhile actually” introduction, I could safely assume the actual analytical content would likely have little substance to speak of. The children’s novel I was researching may have gotten a mention on the back cover, but this search engine result is a dud. Outside of platitudes like “kids books teach literacy” and “kids books teach kids how to persevere,” here was a dead end. There was an echo of “I don’t believe in myself” behind the pages of these strange books and journal articles.
Conversations as complex and multifaceted as disability would start and end by discussing Wonder and leave things at that. Although not the perfect analogy, that is kind of like focusing solely on Uncle Tom’s Cabin in an article about African American literature and thinking discussion begins and ends there.
I won’t reference it directly to protect my fledgling career and because everybody makes mistakes, but the low opinion professionals had of their own subject matter was clear at times. An academic journal article blundered while calling out a middle grade/YA series as sentimental, overly-emotional garbage to make a larger point about low art. Her peer review team didn’t notice she consistently called the main character of series she was maligning by the wrong name. It’s more like the author couldn’t get a feel for the made-up culture’s naming conventions solely from skimming the first book in a series of several dozen books, but the point still stands. No one caught it.
The strange antics happening in children’s literature academia makes sense. Academic study of children’s books is among the youngest disciplines out there aside from video games and the like. It feels frivolous and navel-gazey to many. Like its study is an exercise in being cutesy, genteel, and self-involved.
Good children’s books are not mere bribes to get children to learn how to read or to hypnotize them into washing behind their ears. Children’s books are the most innovative area of the book world, bar none. The most widely read and mostly fondly remembered stories are kids’ books. They reflect all people—not just the young. They are a snapshot of who we are and who we want to be. Lots of adults would benefit from reading more children’s books and quite enjoy themselves doing so.
You Are Not Miss America. This Doesn’t Have to Be About the Children of Tomorrow.
If you’ve been disappointed with how many books you’ve finished this year, embracing more kids’ books into your TBR can really help you get back into the swing of things, even if your go-to are books for adults. (For the record, I’m not out here knocking books for adults). This isn’t about healing your inner child or connecting better with your niece—even though both might happen.
Books for young people are often crisper and better plotted than their grown-up counterparts. Kid’s books are often shorter and less convoluted, so it is easier to start and finish a story and get your momentum building. They are often easier to follow along and listen to while, say, cleaning the house or painting your nails. They make for great beach reads if you able to put up with some light teasing.
Even so, many great children’s books are not the best fit for the average adult reader. The Cat in the Hat and Frog and Toad Are Friends are powerful children’s books, but it takes a certain breed of grown-up to appreciate them.
Perhaps you aren’t in the mood for a coming-of-age story, either? Sometimes, memory lane seems a tad too painful or too same-old-same-old. Sometimes, gaps between who you were and who you remember being get in the way too much to see the value in some books. I suspect this disconnect is most common for easy readers (the first books you read on own) and middle grade books (the books in-between easy readers and books for teenagers). Most of us would rather forget middle school and much of elementary school. I am with you some of the time.
I have plenty of suggestions if you just want a laugh and a masterclass on writing to kids. I quite love Gordan Korman and Dan Gutman’s books for 7th grade boys (and some girls), but I am guessing they are outside of what you, mature reader, want. If you are a teacher or a librarian, the Jude Blume books or Fancy Nancy are quite marvelous. They may be a harder sell if you are just a regular person trying to pass a Summer afternoon. A good kid’s books caters to kids first and anyone else eavesdropping second, if at all.
On the other hand, there are many children’s books out there that could make a great companion to a boozy book club or accompany you quite well on your next plane ride or vacation stay. All children’s books discuss growth a little, but books for kids don’t need to keep all of the focus there. Children’s books discuss everything.
They discuss what community means. They cover how to deal with pain and what it means to even exist. They are heavy stuff in simple wrapping. Here’s a few books you should give a second look if you read them as a kid or should pick up for the first time if you haven’t.
Fair warning ahead. With the exception of some mysteries or books where the plot twist really and truly feels like a startling surprise, I don’t believe in spoilers. With a few exceptions, a good story cannot be spoiled. These books are so famous, you likely know how they end anyway. Perhaps you have even been staying away since you feel you’ve already got the gist of them from afar. These books are definitely worth the journey even if you know the destination.
Charlotte’s Web by E.B. White
E.B. White was a man of many talents. He was half of The Elements of Style by Strunk & White, the most influential grammar and style book ever written. At the same time, White became an accomplished humor essayist with a breezy, unobtrusive wit. You can see a lot of White in both Charlotte and the overall contours of the book if you pay attention.
In Charlotte’s Web, a farm girl name Fern’s grandstanding saves a pig name Wilbur from being killed. This pig goes on to befriend a spider, who performed a parlor trick in a simple country town to save the pig from being slaughtered as an adult.
This book carries a rather difficult truth. To live often means you will be disappointed. To live means you will quite often lose. To live means others will let you down.
Charlotte saves Wilbur but must die alone in an unfamiliar place because of it. It feels unfair that she was the only one in Wilbur’s social circle capable of helping out. Fern, previously so enamored with Wilbur, blows him off to hang out with a boy. Wilbur is kind of stupid.
You have to find the joy in the same things and make the best of any pain and discomfort that comes your way. It’s an advocate for positive pessimism before the term was even coined.
As an added bonus, this book has some of the most easy-flowing prose I’ve ever read. It’s like the thing is being beamed directly into your brain. It’s lovely.
Where the Red Fern Grows by Wilson Rawls
I spoiled Charlotte’s Web, but I have a feeling the reputation of both it and Where the Red Fern Grows precede them. Where the Red Fern Grows is about a country boy named Billy living on his farm on the edge of the woods. He loves both his home and his beautiful hunting dogs, Little Anne and Big Dan.
If you know anything at all about this book, though, it is how the book ends.
It’s the two-in-one variant of the ‘dead dog book’ genre. In popular culture, this book and its cousin Old Yeller exist to cruelly introduce grim, untimely death to unsuspecting grade schoolers.
Where the Red Fern Grows is not just about death. It may be my favorite book for this age group.
The book has simple prose that is smooth sounding but in a slightly different key from E.B. White. The book paints a natural landscape without inauthentic pastoral musings or unnecessary ornaments. The story is a deep well of compassion and care. Rawls is a champion of the art of noticing. Cry, but only if you won’t be cowed. Believe in ghost stories, but go on with your life. Admire the woods but always remember it doesn’t merely exist just for your scenery.
In grad school, I found it uncanny how little this book gets covered when it has such an intriguing place in the history of children’s literature. It fell through the cracks. Without anybody taking much notice, Where the Red Fern Grows has, perhaps, quietly held the status of ‘most widely read piece of Native American literature’ for decades now. Both the author and the main character were mixed-race boys growing up on Cherokee land outside of Tahlequah. Why he isn’t discussed alongside Louise Erdrich, Leslie Marmon Silko, and Sherman Alexie, I don’t know.
Many other aspects of the personal life of the author left their impact. In the bones of Where The Red Fern Grows are the impression of a one-room schoolhouse, a meager home library, and hours upon hours spent outdoors. Rawls worshipped his copy of Call of the Wild. Instead of writing childhood stories on paper, he told his stories aloud to his own beloved dog.
This book is beautiful read aloud. It has the cadence of the best yarn spinner you’ve heard in real life. The book goes paragraphs and paragraphs without a comma, but nothing feels choppy or takes you out of it.
A book can only break your heart if it has already won it. Where the Red Fern Grows is a love letter to a man’s childhood home and a eulogy for the family togetherness he felt there prior to the Great Depression, which scattered due to financial hardship at that time. There is a deeper well of grief here than just slain dogs, even though they are damn good dogs.
Keep your tissues handy, folks.
The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame
Even as a lover of children’s books, I made a conscious effort to avoid The Wind in the Willows for years. You know how sometimes you’ll come across a book and have the very strong assumption that you won’t like it. I was judging a book by its log line instead of its cover, I guess. I felt this hunch about The Wind in the Willows, and I was wrong. Even though most of my concerns regarding the book turned out to be true, something about the delivery made me end up liking the book anyway.
I couldn’t get over this general vibe I got from the vantage point of a long distance. An early-20th century middle grade book about English woodland critters in three-piece suits? Where the only concern of the day, I imagine, may be whether enough cucumber salad has been brought for an appropriate luncheon? Will a proper boat for the excursion be secured? One animal friend wants to read a tome and another wants to play the flute poorly. What so ever shall we do?
There was something so overtly twee and precious about it. Its reputation left an impression that didn’t feel quite real. And my assumptions were true in some sense. This book features plotlines that are non-issues for people who aren’t extra and aren’t dramatic. This book has excellent life lessons. One of this book’s lessons is, “People are messy and stupid. And the world is weird and scary. That’s funny.” Enlightening!
I assumed it was too buttoned-up to be tacky-yet-charming. That it was too innocent to be truly silly. That’s where I went wrong. This book is hilarious.
In this book, a bunch of semi-anthropomorphic animals get into weird, petty nonsense. It’s not unlike the goings-on in the group chats of your not-quite-toxic friends and family. One day, its debates over whether or not the gang has actually seen a wilderness demigod. The next, it’s helping a friend battle their addiction to crashing stolen cars into other people’s property. As needed respite from this drama, this book also has some of the most satisfying descriptions of food ever put to paper and a very cottagecore atmosphere.
I think telling you more about what actually happens The Wind in the Willows won’t do you any good. This book is about the little things. The little things that brighten our days, that trip us up, and that scare us a tad.
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll
I should, in good conscience, have each one book on here where childhood is the point of focus. Even though drugs show up, I don’t think this story is about drugs or about mental illness or about this or about that. It is about the lack of agency so many kids feel.
They are shuttled from place to place. They are expected to know the rules of the game without being told. Nothing in Wonderland is straightforward, and that is all Alice’s fault somehow. Still Wonderland, with all its frustrations, has charm to it anyway. Each day holds its own new and exciting discovery, even if Alice will inevitably receive a ‘tsk-tsk’ about something or another she did wrong.
You know about the white rabbit and about the mad hatter and about the red queen and about the drink that makes you shrink. Countless movies and video games and dorm room posters has taught you that. You should still read the book.
The best thing about Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland comes from Alice’s own words and thoughts. She remembers the overall cadence of her brother’s Latin lessons rather than the content. She sees no use in talking about what happened yesterday because it is in the past. It is hard to pin down exactly who she is, because she is a different person every day, which is what it means to grow and change in this crazy world.
If you have an Alice and Wonderland-themed tea party, there better be soup.
Goodnight Moon by Margaret Wise Brown
Hey, stop laughing at me! At the very least, do the polite thing and snicker at me all the way in the back, ok.
Am I ridiculous? Yes, but that is for other reasons.
Even though a dramatic reading of the book may take 7 minutes if you dawdle, with the right mix of people you can easily spend 3 or 4 times that amount of your day talking over this book.
Margaret Wise Brown may just be my favorite midcentury poet—hiding in plain sight as one of the underappreciated greats just like Wilson Rawls. She has this great ability to infuse narrative into simple, short poetry—all while you cannot see the beams or the joists.
Her work is just as airy as Ezra Pound but with more heart. She has the zest and glib of Allen Ginsberg but without the isolating, more insular side of being an adult. Plus, there are pictures!
It is deeply, deeply strange how popular this book is. There are some books which—because they are so popular for so long—we forget what makes them special in the first place. It is sort of like if Blood Meridian was the most well-known story to do with Westerns or if Synecdoche, New York replaced the usual suspects as the world’s best-known movie. For no clear reason, some of the most experimental literary fiction in the children’s picture book world are household names. It is a strange anomaly about life on planet Earth.
When something is groundbreaking but so well-known, it feels a lot less remarkable.
Goodnight Moon may be seen as the quintessential cozy baby book, but is precious only in theory. It is an unsettling, funny, odd journey through the often quite scary action of surrendering yourself to sleep
Mac Barnett sings the praises of Goodnight Moon, both in his new book Make Believe: On Telling Stories to Children and in his collaboration with fellow kid lit author Jon Klassen for the Looking at Picture Books blog. More eloquently than I ever could, he lays out just how startling Good Night Moon can be.
He writes, “Goodnight Moon contains all those dark currents that run beneath bedtime—the bizarreness of our flickering consciousness, the fear of the unknown, the chthonic ritual of it all…We literally look into the abyss. And then we speak into it. We bid it good night” (Make Believe, 68).
Pair Goodnight Moon with Barnett’s book or In the Great Green Room, a biography by Amy Gary about the full, intriguing life of an underappreciated genius. Or a few pair it with a few more of Brown’s powerful stories. I especially suggest The Runaway Bunny, The Important Book, and The Dead Bird.
