Favorite Childrens Books

I know there are quite a bit of Childrens book writers (possibly illustrators?) And peoples on here who enjoy childrens books.

I dont have kids, but whenever i pull shifts in the childrens room, im blown away by the depth of some of the picture books i come across.

I thought we could make a place to share favorite childrens books and why you like them.

(Not including upper elementary/middle grade chapterbooks like Percy Jackson, Harry Potter, Redwall and the like)

 

Ill go first:

I really enjoyed "The Call of the Swamp" by Davide Cali & Marco Soma.

Its about an axolotl child raised by a couple who wanted a child but couldnt have one. One day, they found him in a swamp and gave him a home and loved him. But as he grew up, he realized he wasnt like them. So he goes back to the swamp to find his "real" parents and discovers that the family who raised him is just as much his "real" family as the one in the swamp. He loves his swamp family but misses his adoptive family and comes to the conclusion that he doesnt have to choose. That he has 2 loving families.

The artwork and the emotion thats put into their expressions was enough to make me tear up at the desk (and when talking about it with a coworker!)

 

Oh no, I have some strong opinions about children's books so apologies in advance. In my defense I have two grade-school-age kids so I have spent a lot of time reading children's books over the last few years.

Some of the classics really do live up to their reputation. Crockett Johnson's Harold and the Purple Crayon is an exercise in unreliable narration worthy of Nabokov, IMHO. Maurice Sendak (Where the Wild Things Are/The Night Kitchen) is good just for how bonkers he is. Ezra Jack Keats (The Snowy Day/Goggles!) is similar in that he also focuses less on plot/character and more on vibes, but in an understated way. I think I like that in kids books because it's a good antidote to how didactic and lecture-y they can often be.

Anything by Mo Willems, but We Are In A Book! has a very clever metatextual gag. (Hm, looking back at what I've written so far I'm starting to see some patterns...)

Some that are perhaps less well known (or just more recent vintage) but also deserving mention:

Oliver Jeffers' The Incredible Book-Eating Boy, which has an OK story but some of my favorite visuals. He uses random bits of old paper--order forms, dictionary pages, handwritten letters etc.--as background to his collage-looking illustrations. I'm a sucker for any visual art that incorporates text somehow.

Joseph Low's Mice Twice is a clever comedy of manners, with cool impressionistic illustrations.

David Small's Imogene's Antlers is a very age-appropriate retelling of Kafka's "The Metamorphosis" (er, with a happier ending), and Kafka is one of my all-time faves so of course I'm going to like it.

Now if we want to talk about least favorites...you'd probably get some even stronger opinions lmao. I've got a few (hundred? thousand?) pretty scathing words on the Berenstain Bears alone...

 

I know i've probably read Harold and the Purple Crayon (or had it read to me) before.... i just dont remember a thing about it. Same with Where The Wild Things Are and Snowy Day (i'm pretty sure I still have a copy of it back in my parents home).
Those just never resonated with me enough to really remember them.

I'd never heard of Mo Willem until taking a course on Childrens Literature in college. I like the Pigeon books!

I dont think I have a least favorite, but 2 of them stand out to me that I just didnt really like. One of them tried to be deep.... about this made up animal that emerges from her burrow and realizes she doesnt look like the other animals, so she literally travels to the beginning of earth, space, and time asking every creature she meets if they've seen her people.
and it ends with her right back in her burrow, right back where she started and she basically shrugs it off like "oh well" and thats the end.
it left me thinking "what was the point of that?" and "wheres the discovery?"
and i cant even remember the NAME of the book, thats how forgettable it was.

The other one, I Go Quiet, is just depressing to me. artwork is pretty... but the darkness of it is kind of disturbing for a childrens book. and, again, im not a parent.... but reading it and looking at the pictures just kind of left me feeling a bit depressed. Its about a person who doesnt feel like she fits in to society (which is depicted as industrial, cold, and grey) and is selectively mute.



(these are some pictures of it. and like i said, i like the artist's style... and he DOES illustrate for horror books..... but it brings the subject matter of the book down)

 

That is...wow. Like an Edward Gorey take on Maus.

 

I happen to have young children, so I unsurprisingly have a few favorites. If the kids and I are in the mood for a heavy dose of fun, something a bit silly (and we typically are), The Legend of Rock Paper Scissors does the trick. Not only do I enjoy reading that one out loud, I enjoy acting it out. Possibly too much.

And for the evenings when we’re craving a story with heart, something more . . . emotive, I’ll often pull Stay: A Girl, a Dog, a Bucket List off their bookshelf, or Our Tree Named Steve. I love both of those books, and highly recommend them.

Goodreads links:
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/31215005-the-legend-of-rock-paper-scissors

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/31145060-stay?ref=nav_sb_ss_4_9

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/248169.Our_Tree_Named_Steve?ref=nav_sb_ss_1_15

 

Jan Brett's books The Mitten and Christmas Trolls were favorites of my children when they were small. I read Grandfather Twilight by Barbara Helen Berger to my son every naptime for a couple of years. My all time favorite children's book is The Sneeches and Other Stories by Dr. Seuss. I love the pale green pants with no one inside them.

I wouldn't waste that kind of energy on the subject, but I am in perfect sympathy with the sentiment. I'd also like to go on record as saying I hope Margaret Wise Brown has to read Good Night, Moon every night for the rest of eternity. Just the sight of the cover is enough to make me break out in a rash.

 

The books I remember best as a young kid came from the Ladybird series, which included classic fairy tales, Cinderella, Goldilocks, all those. My wife still wells up thinking about The Matchstick Girl, which she bought again just a couple of years ago in a charity shop. From school we brought home various books to read in our own time, mostly editions of old Irish legends. As a slightly older kid, Enid Blyton was about all that was available. Never got them for my own kids, not so strangely enough, but I read all the Famous Five and Secret Seven as a kid.

My daughter's first ever letter was a late slip from the local library when she was two. I think we still have it. There was a lot more selection when my kids were young (in their 20's now). They enjoyed Room on the Broom, Bad Baby and the Alfie series, then on to Roald Dahl whom they loved. I Want My Potty had its use at a particular time and they also loved The Gruffalo. I couldn't sway them towards Dr Seuss, though I enjoyed reading those books to them. There was another beautifully illustrated book called Bilbo's Song (?) that was another favourite. We had a fine edition of Night Before Christmas we read every Christmas Eve for years.

Thanks for the nostalgia trip. Funny how so many memories are wrapped up in all these books.

 

Not sure I'd call Lewis a zealot. Narnia books are pretty heavily religious, but so is his buddy Tolkien's writing. Frankly, Tolkien always seemed the more religious to me, Lewis always felt like he was trying to convince himself a little bit.

Dahl though, I used to love his books. I remember when I was really young, learning to read, I'd carry a copy of some book called Rupert the Bear everywhere I went. Oh, and Potter too, when I got aa little older.

Good times.

 

You know, I take it back, Berenstain Bears was awesome for about five seconds when Papa Bear randomly becomes a militant feminist. From No Girls Allowed:

 

this one was adorable!
its about a lightbulb in a closet wondering about the world outside of the closet

(side note.... this book reminds me i need to clean my closet....)

 

I always thought of sad and borderline-depressing children's books as a reaction to the always-happy stories that seem to have washed over what childhood is supposed to be about, rather than sad because sadness is a human emotion children need to learn to understand and manage like all other human emotions. Humans are capable of great atrocities that are part of history and that have shaped contemporary society (at least, this is what the image above in the quote makes me think of), that cannot be spoken to a child as they happened/happen but that can be filtered through imagery to help a child understand the world. I think those books should exist, and then let parents decide how to introduce those to their children if they feel they can provide the proper guidance.

 

Barbapapa always haunted me. There was something sweet, and creepy and wonderful about them. They could turn themselves into objects or animals. I recall Barbapapa building their psychedelic home by having concrete poured over him to make a series of round rooms for him and his wife and their seven kids.


Also Evie and the Wonderful Kangaroo - it was a vintage book from the 50s about a pet kangaroo named Cookie who always kept a lace handkerchief in her pouch.

 

I kept three books from my childhood.

Wump World by Bill Peet. A story against pollution and consumerism.

Dogzilla by Dav Pilkey. A spoof of Godzilla, but having the author's pet dog play the role of the kaiju and the town she goes on a rampage in, is a town of mice (also the author's pets). Had a fun mix of paint and photos for the art-style.

And Cat Kong also by Dav Pilkey. Pretty much the same thing as Dogzilla, but this time a spoof of King Kong starring a cat.

 

Half Magic by Edward Eager. It's the story of some children of the 1920s who discovered a magic talisman which granted only half a wish for each child. Some of the wishes were made inadvertently, making for some confusion until things were sorted out.

I re-read it recently and found that it held up pretty well over the years.

And anything by Dr. Seuss, of course.

 

My 7 year old has recently gotten into the "Zoey and Sassafras" (by Asia Citro, ill. Marion Lindsay) series, which is about a girl who helps injured/sick magical creatures by using scientific experiments to figure out what's wrong with them and how to treat it. It's really interesting, in that it goes deep into the method of science instead of simply listing various trivia facts like a lot of books do. And the science/magic combo is a good touch. Also, perhaps the thing I appreciate most is that it's not as ploddingly didactic as so many "educational" books, but instead has characters who actually seem to do more than just deliver lessons, and who have their own subjective existence.

So yeah, overall I highly recommend for the 6-10 age group. One funny thing though is that while Zoey's mom can see and interact with the magical creatures, her dad can't, and various subplots deal with how they manage these problems while trying to keep him thinking there's nothing weird going on. Which leads me to believe there should be another series of books, from the dad's point of view, about how his daughter and wife act increasingly weird and are clearly hiding some sinister secret from him, and his increasingly difficult attempts to maintain his sanity etc. Although that might not be for the 6-10 age group...