My daughter, who is now 25, and I have agreed that the Great Golden Age of Reading is between ten and twelve years of age, because there are just so many good books out there for that age group—magical adventures, tales of time travel, appropriately gritty family dramas, visions of dystopia, historical epics, all of them s transporting you in a way that makes you look up, blinking the world back into dazed focus, when you’re finished.
Some of my favourite books in the world, and the ones that affected me the most powerfully, I read when I was around eleven years old. And really, is there any better feeling than being a kid, coming home from school, and settling down on the sofa knowing you can read your book uninterrupted until dinnertime? Honestly, I don’t think there is.
So here is my most definitely NOT comprehensive list of childhood classics that my children actually read and loved, followed by, to quote Anne Shirley [from another classic they didn’t read, which hurts my heart] a ‘graveyard of buried hopes’, that is, all the books I loved that they didn’t bother so much as to flip open the cover of, despite my cajoling and pleading. [Although, to be fair, when someone tells me a book is SO GOOD and YOU’RE GOING TO LOVE IT! I tend to be a bit skeptical, and the likelihood of me reading that book plummets, so that there is an unfortunate, direct correlation between someone asking me to read a book and my willingness to read it. Penmarric by Susan Howatch is an example that some people reading this post will recognize.] However, there are many, many other childhood classics that children love, which I have not highlighted here.
Also, to be clear, I am defining childhood classic as something written at least 20 years ago, that is not printed in Comic Sans font with less than 50 words on a page, as so many kids’ books today are—but hey, it gets them reading! To that, I say, not really.
1.) Where The Red Fern Grows by Wilson Rawls
This book destroyed me, but in a good way. The story of a boy in the Ozarks and his two hunting dogs, it’s a great lesson in responsibility as well as heartache [that’s my only spoiler, that, and, I read the ending as an adult with tears streaming down my face.] When my daughter read this book at eight years old, she came out of her bedroom after finishing it, blotchy-faced and traumatised, and demanded to ask why I had let her read it. If that isn’t a recommendation, I don’t know what is! Except maybe that’s just me being sadistic, who knows.
2.) Mandy by Julie Andrew
This is a lovely, sweet book about an orphan who discovers an abandoned cottage in the woods outside the orphanage walls and turns it into a home. It’s a simple story, but the way Mandy lovingly takes care of the cottage is the dream of any child who had a treehouse or den or fort or chicken coop [the last one is personal, as you might have guessed]… or simply longed for one [I had so many dreams]. My daughters loved it. My son, not so much.
3.) My Side of the Mountain by Jean George
I read this in fifth grade and loved it so much my mother read it, too, and she loved it probably more than I did. This is for the pioneering homesteader in all of us, about a 13-year-old boy from New York City who runs away to the Catskills and lives off the land. No family problems here to make him run away [although I imagine his parents were quite worried], he just finds the city too dirty and noisy and wants to forage for groundnuts and train a hawk gosling… as every city boy does. I reread this to my son when he was around eight years old, and was amazed at how technical and descriptive it all was, with explicit instructions on how to hollow out a tree to make a dwelling, tan a deer hide, and also including lovely sketches of various edible plants. I gobbled it all up as a ten-year-old, because on some level, it’s every kid’s fantasy.
4.) The Girl Who Owned A City by O.T. Nelson
Oh my goodness, this book! I LOVED it when I read it aged ten. This is a different kind of kid’s fantasy, set in a dystopian future where every person over the age of twelve has died of a mysterious illness, leaving a world of children to fend for themselves. Lisa, our heroine, realizes she needs to take control of the kids on her street and she grows into a dynamic but also power-hungry leader who ends up ‘owning’ a city. I discovered as an adult that this book is written by a libertarian entrepreneur and that definitely shows—it’s sort of kinder Ayn Rand for kids, but it’s a great story.
5.) A Handful of Time by Kit Pearson
This is a classic time travel story where a girl is sent to her cousins to spend the summer on a lake in Canada, and ends up finding an old watch which transports her back in time to when her mother was a young girl. It’s a bit Narnia-esque but without the magic or fauns.
6.) Dragon’s Blood by Jane Yolen
This is a great fantasy trilogy about a boy who buys his way out of servitude by training up a fighting dragon. The relationship between boy and dragon is really well done and touching, great for both boys and girls.
7.) The Last of the Really Great Whangdoodles by Julie Andrews
I only just realized there are two books by Julie Andrews on this list! This is one I haven’t read, but I had to include it because my children loved it so much. It’s got a Narnia vibe with three children meeting a professor and going to Whangdoodleland, in search of… you guessed it… the last really great Whangdoodle!
And now onto the sadder part of this post, the graveyard of my buried hopes… the books I loved that my children did not. Or at least, they never knew if they did or didn’t because they never read them [sniff] despite my cajoling and pleading. Have I mentioned my cajoling and pleading? I think I have…
They are, in no particular order: The Velvet Room by Zilpha Keatley Snyder; Searching for Shona by Margaret Jean Anderson; The Endless Steppe by Esther Hautzig; A Day No Pigs Would Die by Robert Newton Peck; Bridge to Terabithia by Katherine Paterson, and many, many others, including, most tragically Anne of Green Gables by LM Montgomery, and the fact they didn’t read that one is just… too terrible for words. All I can say is, at least they liked the movie [the 1980s Kevin Sullivan one, obviously, not the Netflix sacrilege]. I should also say I have not mentioned the childhood classics that I didn’t read as a child, in a similar way to my own children—The Railway Children, Treasure Island, Caddie Woodlawn, Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm, The Hobbit [I know!], anything by Arthur Ransome… the list, alas, is just as long as the one for my children.
But not to end this post on a sad note, I do want to say I am so very grateful for all the books my children have read, enjoyed, and loved. I started this post by saying there is no greater feeling than sprawling on the sofa knowing you can read your book uninterrupted for awhile, but actually there is. It’s having your child love a book as much as you did. That almost conspiratorial sense of shared wonder and joy is truly one of the best feelings in the world.
For years I thought I had made up The Last of The Great Whangdoodles because no one had ever heard of anything like that by Julie Andrew’s and I couldn’t remember the name. I think I had read it from the library near my grandparents. I was so excited to find it again. Also, do you read Lucy Parker? My absolute favourite of hers, The Austen Playbook, centres around a fictional play called The Velvet Room. I had no idea there was a book of the same name. My niece is nine, so she is just on the cusp! She has enjoyed Malory Towers and is now reading Narnia so I have high hopes. Last year I gave her Anne of Green Gables for Christmas, though I don’t think she has tried it yet. My next plan is Noel Streatfeild, I think.