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Little Women
Louisa May Alcott
James Mustich
Louisa May Alcott grew up in Concord, Massachusetts, the second of four daughters of a noted proponent of Transcendentalism, Bronson Alcott. Ralph Waldo Emerson was a friend of the family, as were Henry David Thoreau and Nathaniel Hawthorne. Despite her transcendentalist pedigree, Louisa May Alcott ...show more
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Jane Eyre
Charlotte Brontë
Destitute young woman leaves rotten boarding school for job as governess in sprawling mansion, falls in love with broodingly handsome employer with dark secret. In the twenty-first century, the plot of Jane Eyre might sound clichéd, yet Charlotte Brontë’s 1847 novel, about a plain orphan girl exceed...show more
Papa, Please Get the Moon for Me
Eric Carle
Any child born into a reading family after 1969 is no doubt familiar with Eric Carle’s The Very Hungry Caterpillar, as well as several others by the artist who turned an eye for collage-based compositions into a new kind of picture book. Parents of those children, however, have a particularly warm s...show more
The Awakening
Kate Chopin
The story is simple enough: Edna Pontellier, wife of a New Orleans businessman and mother of two, is aimlessly dissatisfied with her role as society wife. On a holiday on Grand Isle, something in her is swayed by the music of a pianist and the company of a young man. Experiencing a modicum of indepe...show more
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
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
The Book of Common Prayer
The Church of England’s Book of Common Prayer was first published in 1549, and, while it has gone through several revisions in response to shifts in political power and fluctuations in ecclesiastical fashion, it has been in continuous use ever since. To be sure, one wouldn’t read the Book of Common ...show more
A Little Princess
Frances Hodgson Burnett
Like most heroes whose trials and triumphs readers have loved to assume as their own through the power of fanciful identification, Sara Crewe possesses a poise that never deserts her, no matter what misfortunes are thrown her way. And make no mistake: A Little Princess is an adventure story as fille...show more
The Story of Babar
Jean de Brunhoff
Some denizens of children’s literature are so entrenched in our collective imagination, and Babar the elephant is certainly one, that they seem natural formations in the landscape of our fancy—timeless, enduring presences the world has always known. Not so, of course; even Babar was invented, making...show more