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Two newer series that we have really enjoyed are The Green Ember series by SD Smith and The Wingfeather Saga by Andrew Peterson. My kids have all listened to them multiple times. We also love Heidi, The Secret Garden, A Little Princess, The Hobbit, and Trumpet of the Swan. We’ve also really enjoyed Little Pilgrim’s Progress illustrated by Joe Sutphin. Where the Mountain Meets the Moon by Grace Lin is another favorite

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Great ideas! My youngest son loved the Green Ember series and Wingfeather.

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I would also add Caddy Woodlawn, Anne of Green Gables, and All of a Kind Family to the list. Mrs Piggy Wiggle is a favorite series in our house too.

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Mrs Piggle Wiggle

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Sep 20Liked by Joel J Miller

I’ll have to look these up—since I’ve been out of the loop too long.

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Sep 22·edited Sep 22

A terrific Grace Lin picture book is A Big Mooncake for Little Star. The story is precious, and the warmth and love shared between the mom and the little girl in Lin's wonderful illustrations will delight.

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Awesome! Thanks!

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Sep 20·edited Sep 20Liked by Joel J Miller

Oh what a question to start the morning with! I was just saying to my twelve-year old yesterday that I miss reading together. He really loves the Narnia series (especially The Dawn Treader), which I assume you might alreay have read. We always used the Mensa Reading list for ideas:

Grade k-3 https://www.mensaforkids.org/achieve/excellence-in-reading/excellence-in-reading-k-3-list/

Grade 4-6 https://www.mensaforkids.org/achieve/excellence-in-reading/excellence-in-reading-4-6-list/.

Some of our favorites from there were Anne of Green Gables, The Borrowers, Cheaper by the Dozen, and Heidi. We also read any Roal Dahl and Astrid Lindgren (Pippi Longstocking series) that we could get our hands on. How wonderful that Naomi gets to spend bedtime reading together with her dad!

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Ruth, you’ve always got so many great ideas! Naomi and I haven’t read Narnia yet. I think she might need to be a bit older. But Dahl would a ton of fun.

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Oct 1Liked by Joel J Miller

Read Narnia! Several times with a couple years in between; she and dad will get more/different takes on the Christian themes…

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Dahl was one of our favorites! A hilarious short read is George's Marvellous Medicine and my daughter especially enjoyed Matilda. If you are not familiar with Astrid Lindgren, she is to me like a Swedish Roald Dahl and also definitely worth putting on your list (Karlsson on the Roof and Emil and the Sneaky Rat are superb). Always happy to share reading ideas :)

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Several people have mentioned her in these comments. I love it when the suggestions converge like that! We’ve got a copy of Pippi Longstocking; I’m delighted to discover there are more!

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Sep 20Liked by Joel J Miller

You've already got many of my favorites, but I suggest seeking out books by Hilda van Stockum and Astrid Lindgren. The latter wrote the Pippi Longstocking books, which are wonderful; but I always especially loved the "children of Noisy Village" books, and, when I was a little older, the Bill Bergson books. Hilda van Stockum wrote many books about happy large families: some based on her own children (The Mitchells, Canadian Summer, Friendly Gables), some set in Ireland (the "Bantry Bay" books), some set in Holland (Andries). There's also a remarkable book about a Dutch family enduring WWII and the German occupation: The Winged Watchman. I read and reread these so many times ...

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We just purchased the first Pippi Longstocking (I didn’t know there were more). Those others sound great as well. Thanks!

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Sep 20Liked by Joel J Miller

I received The Little House in the big Woods and Little House on the Prairie in, I think, Christmas 1967 when I was going on seven and loved the entire series. A few years later I greatly enjoyed Johnny Tremain. I love Harriet the Spy (as mentioned below) - partly because it perfectly captures Manhattan in those days.

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Sep 20Liked by Joel J Miller

Yes, I also read and reread the entire series of "Little House" books. A good companion to them is Carol Ryrie Brink's "Caddie Woodlawn." I suppose teachers & librarians of today may feel constrained to deprecate these books (because some characters express negative attitudes towards the Indians); parents should be made of sterner stuff. Anyone who actually reads the books will see that there are a mix of attitudes (on both sides). Brink wrote other books (quite different) that I also enjoyed, about a family that travels to France for the father's sabbatical (one of my first encounters with a book that tried to describe a foreign language in a realistic way: "George" comes out "Shorsh"), and a pleasant fantasy called "Baby Island."

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I’ve only read two of the Little House books but loved them. I get the objections but agree with you: “sterner stuff.”

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Sep 22Liked by Joel J Miller

After all, we can say that (at least) two distinct attitudes towards the Indians are dramatically expressed, in the "Little House" books. There's Ma, who fears and loathes them; she is unhappy when some Indians wearing fresh skunk skins come into the cabin demanding food, when they lived in Indian Territory ("Little House on the Prairie"). But there is also a measure of respect for Indians. At the beginning of "The Long Winter" (which is maybe the novel that impresses me most, as an adult), an elderly Indian warns the settlers in DeSmet that a hard winter is coming; they should prepare for it; and events prove him right. Clearly, Laura's Pa has respect for the dignity of the Indians, and he gets Laura to watch, with him, as a procession of Indians passes by their cabin for hours (this is the end of "Little House on the Prairie"); they've been ordered to leave this area and move West. Something of the incompatibility of the two cultures comes into that unforgettable scene.

We don't have to tell children, in detail, about the Mankato massacres of the 1860s or other atrocities that would have been on Ma's mind; we can admit to our children that the US Army slaughtered defenceless women and children, at times. Upsetting as all this is, it's surely better than pretending that these things never happened.

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Sep 22·edited Sep 22

When children are old enough they can learn about how complicated these issues were. I totally agree. When I was little and reading the Little House books I didn't understand why Ma hated and feared natives; when I was in school I only learned the 90s-style "noble savage" tropes and still didn't get it; when I was an adult I read more widely on the topic and understood that Ma was entirely correct to fear being a woman alone on the prairie, and that the natives were sometimes the victim of unprovoked war crimes, and that there was more than enough staggering brutality on all sides to go around. It was a fraught and dangerous and complicated time.

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Sep 21Liked by Joel J Miller

Brink's book about the family in France was called Family Sabbatical. My kids enjoyed hearing that read aloud -- especially the children's attempt to duplicate an American Halloween party. Brink also wrote a prior book about this family called Family Grandstand which takes place in a midwestern college town. There is also a follow-up book to Caddie Woodlawn titled Magical Melons which was retitled Caddie Woodlawn's family in later editions.

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Wonderful. Thank you!

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I am certain lots of people will recommend wonderful books. I would add to the pile a bit of well-chosen poetry - Hilaire Beloc, or more modern masters like Shel Silverstein - who capture, love and feed the anarchy of childhood. Roald Dahl does that too, quite brilliantly, however unloveable some of his adult views may have been. And, recalling my childhood, I was also hungry for practical instruction: how to fix a bike, how to build a treehouse, how to forage for free food. Why? So that I could become Prince Caspian, or Edmund, or a Hobbit... and for real, not just in my imagination.

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Sep 20·edited Sep 20Author

Brilliant! I recall that Belloc wrote books of verse for naughty kids. That could be hilarious.

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The thing is, they stay with you. Belloc's 'Cautionary Tales' (do get one with original illustrations) are doggerel, I guess, if you're going to be literary about it. But very clever. And they meet the child's mind, at the child's level, with full respect, while offering wisdom from the adult world. There is violence and some savage endings (as in Dahl) but in my experience, children do not benefit from bowdlerised storytelling. Part of the value of a well-told tale, or superficially silly piece of verse, is in the moderate shock of it - a child thereby enacts the event and emotion in their head and heart, and it serves as practice for the (somewhat harsher) reality of adulthood. I believe stories are the training rooms of the young heart.

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I think that’s exactly right. Kids always come up with horrendous ideas on their own, often laughing about them. There’s just some things the human mind needs to entertain—if only to “practice” the emotions that go along with it.

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Sep 20·edited Sep 20Liked by Joel J Miller

Precisely so. It's about practice in a safe environment, in which the child can 'test drive' their emotional responses. But in addition, I think good stories are also a repository of wisdom (strategies, perhaps, though that is too transactional a word) we draw upon, usually unconsciously, when things get tempestuous later in life. Good stories are a larder, laid in for hard times.

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“Good stories are a larder, laid in for hard times.” I love that idea.

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Belloc is in the public domain here: https://gutenberg.org/ebooks/27424

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Sep 20Liked by Joel J Miller

C.S. Lewis’ Chronicles of Narnia, for sure. Mark Twain, both fiction (Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn) and nonfiction (especially Life on the Mississippi and Roughing it). Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes. H.Ridder Haggard (King Solomon’s Mines, She), bales of science fiction starting with Heinlein. If you can find them, the Random House Landmark Books, a long series of American and European history written by solid authors. Just a start….

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author

Great suggestions!

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Sep 20Liked by Joel J Miller

My special recommendations that not many people are familiar with are the Jenny and the Cat Club books by Esther Averill (your daughter may well be able to read those on her own), The Little Bookroom by Eleanor Farjeon (a collection of short tales), and the younger stories of Elizabeth Goudge. The Little White Horse is widely considered her best.

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author

Thanks for those! Jenny and the Cat Club books and Little White Horse sounds great.

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Sep 20Liked by Joel J Miller

Oh yes, the Cat Club books are wonderful. They put me in mind of Margery Sharp's "Rescuer" books, about the mice Bernard and Miss Bianca .... (Nothing like the Disney adaptation, which is much later--as is typical of Disney adaptations.)

Speaking of which, although I did enjoy the Julie Andrews "Mary Poppins" movie very much as a child, the actual "Mary Poppins" books are quite different: weaving the mundane and the magical--set at the same time, roughly, as A. A. Milne's Christopher Robin books, not in the Edwardian setting of the movie--and quite unforgettable.

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Sep 20Liked by Joel J Miller

Oh, the Rescuer books are so fun! And I agree with you about the Mary Poppins books; I always really enjoyed those and they are very very different from the movie. My all-time favorite chapter is Bad Wednesday, which is also terrifying 😁

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Sep 20Liked by Joel J Miller

Yes--the chapter where Jane virtually (that is, if not for Mary Poppins at the last moment!) disappears into the Royal Doulton plate. That terrifying old grandfather (or was it a great-grandfather?) !! So glad to have had such literature in my hands at an early age. Thanks for the reminder!

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We’ve got a few of the Mary Poppins books. I bet Naomi will enjoy those.

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Sep 20Liked by Joel J Miller

Diana Wynne Jones is my very favorite of all time author, but I would probably save her for a year or so. Except her humorous short stories, which were usually told as bedtime stories to her own boys and are very funny. After that, the Chrestomanci books or Howl's Moving Castle are the best place to start.

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I’m very interested in Howl’s Moving Castle. I’d seen the movie several years back but didn’t think about the fact it was based on a book. I should have known!

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I thought I was the only person in the world who knew about The Little Bookroom! One of the stories in there was the first my daughter read by herself. The Little White Horse is amazing - I loved it with a passion as a child, and just as much when I read it to my daughter. There's also a great film version called Moonacre (my daughter - now grown - is dyslexic and bilingual, so I often tried to read her books that had a solid movie or TV tie-in, so that she was getting all the language from all directions!) The Borrowers is another great one, as is almost anything by E.Nesbit. The Little House books are such a resource of American history they are great to read together - and I agree, The Long Winter is an incredible book. I seem to remember I may have had a book by LIW's daughter which recounted life after the books finished, and addressed some of the issues. I think a lot of the books I've mentioned are future reading, and I'd add to that list the books by Joan Aiken - there are lovely short stories, but her best are the ones that include Wolves of Willoughby Chase and Nightbirds On Nantucket.

Oh what fun you will have!

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Do you know of Julie Edwards' book Mandy? Though there are many books I could mention, I think that this was the most *satisfying* book I read as a kid. You might put it on the TBR for when Naomi is 8 or so.

In terms of MacDonald, we started our children off by reading The Golden Key, which seemed to be a good first story of his.

There's a beautiful edition of "The Secret Garden" that has also been a favored read-aloud with my 5-6 year olds. It is the one with illustrations by Inga Moore.

I also recommend Astrid Lindgren's lesser-known (in America, at least) novels. Your daughter would probably *love* "The Children of Noisy Village."

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author

Great ideas here. Astrid Lindgren has received several votes so far. I’m eager to jump in there.

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Sep 20Liked by Joel J Miller

I second The Children of Noisy Village! It's delightful and my then 6yo loved it.

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Sep 20Liked by Joel J Miller

I like Mandy, but I adore The Last of the Really Great Whangdoodles. I read that so many times as a kid!

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Whangdoodles is our current read-aloud! Mandy is still my favorite, but Whangdoodles is really whimsical and fun and we are loving it!

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Sep 20Liked by Joel J Miller

We loved Mandy when we were growing up, a hidden gem.

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Such a good book. I still reread it every few years or so.

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Lots of great suggestions here already, and plenty of it of vintage dates, so I have fewer qualms about suggesting one first published in 1930; Arthur Ransome's 'Swallows and Amazons'. Like all these classics there are aspects that will need some explanation for modern kids, but some of the really problematic attitudes that we find in other period fiction don't intrude. And it's a great one for girls. In Swallows and Amazons, of the six young protagonists, four are girls; when we get to 'Winter Holiday' and 'Pigeon Post'—the best of the series in my opinion—it's five out of eight, and they're all well-developed characters with their own strengths. I'm sure that reading these books was a great antidote to a lot of the 'boys' literature I was exposed to. In particular, the character of Nancy Blackett—who proves, especially in later books, to be the real leader and instigator of adventures—helped to shake up my expectations an understanding of gender.

I've written a good deal about Ransome and his books, including a couple of Substack pieces (one here: https://theshatteredmoon.substack.com/p/holding-to-ransome?r=jh5v5)

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author

What a cool discovery. Thanks!

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Sep 20Liked by Joel J Miller

Yes, "Swallows and Amazons." One year in the 60s my parents ordered the whole set for me from Blackwell's in the UK; a red-letter day when two boxes of books arrived (there are about 12 of them). Wonderful adventures starring kids mostly left on their own, without adults (and quite resourceful).

In general, if you can get your children reading books written before about 1960, so much the better: more likely to have the long, narrative, descriptive passages--which I often realized I needed to reread and concentrate better on--as opposed to the breezy, snappy dialogue. If you learn to read "older" books like this, it will be easier to transition to older books like Dickens, Austen, the Brontes, etc.

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Good to hear. That sounds right.

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You’ve already named some good ones. Some more: Charlotte’s Web, The Phantom Tollbooth, Bride to Terabithia, Anne of Green Gables, Penrod, the sports stories of John R. Tunis, the dog stories of Albert Payson Terhune, Krabat, … am forgetting so many, but have to run and catch a flight!

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She loved Charlotte’s Web. I bet she’d love The Phantom Tollbooth, too. Thanks for the other suggestions.

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Oh, yes, and I haven’t read it, but my children all liked The Bronze Bow. Ironically, I have a post going up on my own Substack in half an hour about reading The Black Arrow to my daughter recently!

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Sep 20Liked by Joel J Miller

There are a lot of good books by Elizabeth George Spear (author of "The Bronze Bow," set in Biblical times). Several involve the Colonial period in America: "Calico Captive," about a girl captured by Indians allied with the French, in the French and Indian War; "The Witch of Blackbird Pond," about religious freedom in the Colonies. We read some of these when I was in 5th grade; but I know I kept reading them thereafter.

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author

The Witch of Blackbird Pond sounds interesting. Thanks!

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I loved that book!

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Sep 20Liked by Joel J Miller

When she's a bit older, books bt Johnathan Auxier are wonderful - Peter Nimble, Sophie Quire, Sweep, and The Night Gardener all come to mind. We found two series by Elizabeth Enright that we loved: one is a 4-book series about the Melendy family, beginning with "The Saturdays." The other is a set of two books about a set of cousins and their summer adventures in a forgotten space: "Gone-Away Lake" and " Return to Gone-Away Lake."

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I’ve never heard of any of these. Wonderful! Thanks!

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Sep 20Liked by Joel J Miller

The Anne of Green Gables series was formative for me (though the later books get more mature), as were The Secret Garden and A Little Princess by Frances Hodgson Burnett. The Winnie-the-Pooh series is delightful. Among more recently published children’s books, I’ve loved Kimberly Brubaker Bradley’s The War that Saved My Life and its follow-up, The War I Finally Won, and A Place to Hang the Moon by Kate Albus.

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These sound great. I’d forgotten about The Secret Garden.

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Sep 20Liked by Joel J Miller

Five is such a fun age to read to. They can listen to the long chapter books, but still enjoy the picture books too. There are excellent suggestions here already, but here are a few books that I have successfully read to niece and nephew in that age group:

- The Hobbit

- The Little White Horse by Elizabeth Goudge

- The Good Master by Kate Seredy

- Around the World in 80 Days by Jules Verne - I would recommend the new Usborne translation of this.

- Ballet Shoes by Noel Streatfield

- Twelve Kinds of Ice by Ellen Bryan Obed

- The Armourer's House by Rosemary Sutcliff

I am currently reading Sutcliff's 'The Eagle of the Ninth' to an 8 and 6 year old at their request, and they keep asking for more chapters.

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Sep 20Liked by Joel J Miller

You've mentioned so many great books! Lots of books in addition to the wonderful "Ballet Shoes" by Noel Streatfeild; she wrote a memorable semi-autobiography ("A Vicarage Childhood"), too. Kate Seredy's "The Good Master" and its sequel. Books by Rosemary Sutcliff: as a Latin teacher myself, I really appreciate how she brings to life the Romano-Celt population of Britain at the time of the Anglo-Saxon invasions.

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I’ll have to explore Sutcliff more. Those sound interesting.

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Those look great!

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Sep 20Liked by Joel J Miller

So many great books to choose from! In addition to many listed here, my kids and I have thoroughly enjoyed several of Kate DiCamillo’s stories including The Beatryce Prophecy and The Tale of Despereaux. Also, Katherine Patterson’s The Bridge to Terebithia and The Great Gilly Hopkins will both be fantastic reads when she is a little older. One additional author that we have loved (especially in the younger years) is Eleanor Estes who wrote Ginger Pye and The Moffats stories. These stories are perfect for the early elementary years.

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author

Excellent. Thanks for the suggestions. Despereaux would be perfect!

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Sep 20Liked by Joel J Miller

Thanks for mentioning Eleanor Estes! The Moffats books are especially good; and remind me of Elizabeth Enright's books (maybe for slightly older children) about the Melendy family--having adventures first in NYC circa 1940 ("The Saturdays") and then in the country after moving to a big house ("The Four-Story Mistake," "Then There were FIve," "A Spiderweb for Two"). Wonderful, memorable families and characters!

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Sep 20Liked by Joel J Miller

Yes! I’ve seen those and thought we should read them as well.

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author

Good to know about Estes!

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Sep 20Liked by Joel J Miller

I recently read The Witch Family, by Eleanor Estes, and it's perfect for a 6-year-old Halloween. Just charming and a lot of fun.

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That’s excellent. Thanks!

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You'll have a lot of comments today! The point is the reading. I was just remarking to our friend @henryoliver that JK Rowling brought more young people to big thick books than I could have ever imagined and it's too bad politics may keep some young people from those books. My kids read them all several times al the way through.

By the way Joan Hedrick's biography of Stowe is something else entirely but glad you started where you did!

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I think you’re right about Rowling. We’ve grown unable to separate art from the artist and instead insist on puritanical triangulation between art, artist, and our personal values. It’s exhausting just thinking about. Shoving that dynamic aside, Naomi would love the Potter stories!

Re Stowe, I just finished David S. Reynolds’s ‘Mightier than the Sword,’ which is all about ‘Uncle Tom’s Cabin.’ Great read.

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The Secret Garden is one of my favorite classic children's books. Little illustrated gems are Beatrice Potter books that you must read with an English accent. The Tale of Tom Kitten is my personal favorite. As she gets older, say, twelve, she can start the Anne of Green Gables series. The Mouse and the Motorcycle series were fun as well as the Ramona Quimby and Henry Huggins series by Beverly Cleary. I see that Chronicles of Narnia has already been mentioned, but I'll second that!

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We’ve read the Beatrix Potter books. She did love those! The others here all look good as well.

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