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Tuck Everlasting
Natalie Babbitt
James Mustich
Age has its despairs, yet without its dimension, our lives lose their shape: A timeless life, without growth or change, would be drearier than the day is long. That’s the profound truth that illuminates this extraordinary fable, in which a young girl named Winnie finds herself catapulted into great ...show more
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The Wonderful Wizard of Oz
L. Frank Baum
There’s no greater tribute to the pleasures of L. Frank Baum’s book than to say that the story is so good that it isn’t overwhelmed by the images from the wonderful Judy Garland movie. The story unfolds with a declarative matter-of-factness that puts no barrier between the real and the imagined; bec...show more
Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret.
Judy Blume
Narrated by Margaret Simon, an almost twelve-year-old who moves from New York City to the Jersey suburbs, Blume’s novel for young readers engages, with directness and a strong dose of appropriate preteen bewilderment, themes seldom treated so familiarly at the time. Top of the list is the perplexity...show more
Harriet the Spy
Louise Fitzhugh
Like an outsider Nancy Drew, Fitzhugh’s Harriet has won the esteem—“allegiance” is probably a better word—of countless young girls who’ve mimicked her notetaking (as well as her unwavering love for tomato sandwiches). She is, in a word, beloved, most likely because her stance apart—as writer, as spy...show more
The Phantom Tollbooth
Norton Juster
Like many kids, Milo, the protagonist of Norton Juster’s quick-witted fantasy, is chronically bored. Until the day, that is, when a mysterious package appears in his room without explanation. What follows is one of the most exuberant, clever, silly, mind-bending, and joyous expeditions in children’s...show more
The Giving Tree
Shel Silverstein
Charlotte’s Web
E. B. White
Someone once called E. B. White the most companionable of writers, and the adjective fits him like a glove. His conversational genius set the enduring tone of The New Yorker in the magazine’s formative years, and his unassumingly authoritative personal essays gave the genre a genuine American accent...show more
Little House in the Big Woods
Laura Ingalls Wilder
At the age of sixty or so, Laura Ingalls Wilder wrote a memoir of her upbringing called Pioneer Girl, for which she couldn’t find a publisher. With some advice and guidance from her daughter, Rose Wilder Lane, she recast her memories as a book for young readers, Little House in the Big Woods. A cele...show more
The Splendid and the Vile: A Saga of Churchill, Family, and Defiance During the Blitz
Erik Larson
A fascinating account of Churchill's first year as Prime Minister as seen through the eyes of those around him. The characters truly come to life and you will want to keep reading even if you already know what happens next.
Things Fall Apart
Chinua Achebe
Composed in English and published in 1958, two years before Nigeria declared independence, Things Fall Apart was the first African novel to attain a wide international readership. It is a short, sparely told tale that nevertheless embraces themes of enormous import: fate and will, the determining i...show more
A Tale of Two Cities
Charles Dickens
A Tale of Two Cities may have the most famous opening of any novel ever written, the frequent application of its words outside the novel’s specific context giving it an edge over the nearest competition, Anna Karenina and Pride and Prejudice. Echoing the dichotomies invoked in its opening sentences,...show more
Great Expectations
Charles Dickens
More nuanced and darker in mood than David Copperfield, Great Expectations is its author’s deepest working of the terrain of childhood and the fears and fates that spring from it. Anchored in a Kentish village, around which the years and events of the complicated plot will revolve, the book returns ...show more
Gone With the Wind
Margaret Mitchell
An truly epic yet also deeply personal story of survival. While the author and main character demonstrate pro-Confederacy sentiment, some of its conclusions are surprising. Readers who want pro-Confederacy propaganda can read it as such. But readers who acknowledge the skew of its viewpoint will ...show more