Irritable Bowel Syndrome Message Boards | Re: Children's books and authors........

OK, so I'm late ... but this is totally my subject, I LOVE kids' books and own a couple thousand (much to my husband's chagrin). I'll skip the ones already mentioned even though I dearly love Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle and Anne of Green Gables.

Some of my favorites (going by memory and by what I can see on the bookshelves by twisting my neck around) --

Lloyd Alexander -- his Prydain Chronicles are my very favorite fantasy series of all-time. I also really like the Vesper Holly books.

Joan Aiken's Wolves Chronicles -- I cried when she died recently, mainly out of pity of no new books. This series is a bit uneven but most of the books are great. "The Stolen Lake" is still my favorite.

L.M. Boston's books about Green Knowe, a very old country house in England. Probably a little tough for most ordinary kids, but super-magical for adults.

Carol Ryrie Brink's "Baby Island". About two girls who are shipwrecked with several babies. I LOVE this book and read it dozens of times when I was a little girl. She also wrote "Caddie Woodlawn" -- all of her stuff is good, really.

Meg Cabot's "Princess Diaries" series -- I haven't read all of her stuff, but what I've read is very cute and total fun fluff. "Princess Diaries" books are way better for some reason, not sure why exactly? Don't judge by the movies.

Sylvia Cassedy's books. Usually sad but very good, typically about troubled kids. "Behind the Attic Wall" is my favorite.

Eth Clifford's books about the two girls whose names I can't remember -- Jo-Beth and Mary Rose, I think? They keep getting lost/stuck in strange places, beginning with "Help! I'm a Prisoner in the Library!" Her Harvey books are cute too.

Eoin Colfer's Artemeis Fowl books. Fantasy/science fiction/genius.

Ellen Conford's books -- her ones about high school kids are the best and very funny. My favorite -- "A Royal Pain", about a girl who finds out she's really a princess (or is she?).

Caroline B. Cooney's books are all pretty good, generally about teenagers and typical/atypical problems they face. "Don't Blame the Music" (a girl whose sister has emotional problems) and "The Pary's Over" (a girl who graduates high school but doesn't go to college) are my favorites.

Sharon Creech's books are all sad and funny and true. "Walk Two Moons" is my favorite.

Paula Danziger is a good author in general. "This Place Has No Atmosphere" is my favorite -- set in the future about a girl whose parents are amongst the first of people colonizing the moon.

Elizabeth Enright's books are all good. "Gone-Away Lake" and its sequel "Return to Gone-Away" are probably my favorite, but the books featuring the Melendy family are also excellent.

Eleanor Estes -- anything, really, but "The Hundred Dresses" remains a childhood favorite and I also love the books about the Moffats.

Anything by Anne Fine. "Flour Babies" is my favorite. Hers are contemporary books about tween kids, she's a British writer.

John Fitzgerald's "Great Brain" books. Seven of them set in Utah I think in the early 1900s, about a boy and his conniving older brother.

Carolyn Haywood's books about Betsy, Billy, etc. These are very old-fashioned and charming, but a bit young.

Diana Wynne Jones writes splendid fantasy novels -- all very clever and very funny. My personal favorite is "Howl's Moving Castle" and its sequel "Castles in the Air", but I've never read a bad book by her.

Maud Hart Lovelace's Betsy books. She takes Betsy all the way from age five to a married woman. My favorites are Betsy's high school years as well as "Betsy and the Great World". I also love "Emily of Deep Valley", which isn't a Betsy book but set in the same place.

Anne Morrow Lindbergh's books are also terrific -- most of them have to do with time travel. My favorite of hers is "Three Lives to Live".

Margaret Mahy writes books that are silly nonsense or incredible densely-plotted literary treasures -- either way hey're marvelous. "The Tricksters" and "Memory" are my favorites. Most of her books are fantasy, or have some echoes or fantasy.

Robert McCloskey's "Homer Price" books should be required reading for every American child. Total classics.

Mary Nash's "Mrs. Coverlet" books are very cute -- "While Mrs. Coverlet Was Away" is a classic, but the other two are also great as well ("Mrs. Coverlet's Detectives" and "Mrs. Coverlet's Magicians").

Phyllis Reynolds Naylor's "Alice" books deal with the ups-and-downs of a typical adolescent girl. I LOVE these books even though I am no longer 13, and I still await each release. Naylor's other books are also generally good -- the Bessledorf Hotel books are cute and I really liked the York Trilogy but I can't read the spines from here to get the titles ("Footsteps in the Water", "Shadows on the Wall", something like that).

Edith Nesbit's books are all fantastic -- fantasy books written in Victorian times. "Five Children and It" was my childhood favorite but as an adult my favorite is "The Enchanted Castle". There is nothing in any modern horror movie that can top the chills that radiate through me at the Ugly-Wuglies.

Ursula Nordstrom's "The Secret Language" was also a favorite as a child. I've never read anything else by her. I believe this book is out of print -- I had a hard time finding my copy.

Mary Norton's "Borrower" books are classics and rightly so. These deal with tiny people who live in houses (if you ever read "The Littles" -- they were a rip-off of "The Borrowers) "borrowing" from the "big people".

Barbara Park's Junie B. Jones series are hilarious. Also try "Mick Harte Was Here". It's the only book I've read where I really have both laughed and cried simultaneously.

Tamora Pierce's fantasy series are very good, chock-full of strong female characters. My favorite still remains her first series starring Alanna. "The Lioness Quartet" I believe they're called.

Philip Pullman's books are all incredible. I love his recent trilogy "His Dark Materials", which is a retelling of "Paradise Lost" -- "The Golden Compass", "The Subtle Knife", "The Amber Spyglass". My favorite is the Sally Lockhart trilogy -- "The Ruby in the Smoke", "The Shadow in the North", "The Tiger in the Well". "The Tin Princess" is also a great book and is a companion book of sort to the Sally Lockhart trilogy (it features some of the characters from the trilogy).

Candice F. Ransom's Kobie books are also a priceless part of books for adolescent girls -- "Going on Twelve", "Thirteen", "Fourteen and Holding", "Fifteen at Last". There's another one she wrote later on, but I don't quite remember the title -- "Almost Ten and a Half", I believe. Her other books are also good.

Keith Robertsen's Henry Reed books are great if you like Homer Price. They are also more old-fashioned (written in the 50s or 60s I believe), but they're hilarious.

Barbara Robinson never did write that many books, but her "The Best Christmas Pageant Ever" is a classic. I much prefer, however, her book "My Brother Louis Measures Worms (and other stories)". A quick read and very funny.

Louis Sachar writes some good off-beat books -- "Sideways Stories from Wayside School" still remains the best in my opinion. This is a collection of stories about kids in a very strange school. I must've read this a hundred times as a kid.

Lemony Snickett's "A Series of Very Unfortunate Events" cannot be adequately described -- read them, they are awesome.

Zilpha Keatley Snyder is also one of those who never wrote a bad book, but my favorite is "The Velvet Room" and the Stanley kids books -- "The Headless Cupid" was the first. "The Egypt Game" is also really good.

Anything Mary Stolz wrote is good.

Sydney Taylor's "All of a Kind Family" series -- five books in all -- about a Jewish family in New York City in the early 1900s. This was one of my favorites when I was a kid. (OK, so I had a lot of favorites.)

Stephanie Tolan's Skinner family books. "The Great Skinner Strike" is the first one, where their mother goes on strike -- in the household.

Vivian Vande Velde writes intriguing fantasy novels ... intriguing because her characters are not always the typical Good or Evil. My favorites -- "User Unfriendly" (about a group of kids in an interactive computer game that ends up going awry) and "A Well-Timed Enchantment".

Gertrude Chandler Warner's Boxcar Children books -- but the real ones, as in the first 19 of the series. Any books after that were ghostwritten.

Jean Webster's "Daddy Long-Legs" and its sequel "Dear Enemy" are both very good and very funny. I didn't read these until fairly recently and somehow I had always imagined "Daddy Long-Legs" as being very soppy and treacly but this is SO not the case. (Well, except maybe for the end.)

Barbara Willard's Mantlemass Chronicles are excellent -- very good and very readable historical novels. Some of them are quite exciting as well.

Catherine Woolley's Ginnie, Cathy, or Libby books. Of all of "my" authors, I think I regard Catherine Woolley with the most fondness. "A Room For Cathy" is one of my all-time favorites. Her books are very old-fashioned (she started writing in the 1940s), but they are so homey and ordinary and cozy. I LOVE THESE BOOKS. Unfortunately, they are out of print and really tough to find. Most of mine were purchased on eBay at great expense. Some libraries do still have them.

Carol Beach York writes a variety of books but mostly suspense books. "Beware of this Shop" is one of my favorites, nice and creepy with no gore or ucky bits. Her books about the Good Day Orphanage (most of them featuring Miss Know-it-All) are also good, very cute.

my Nancy Drews (the original 56) are dearly beloved, but if you can find them, the "blue tweed" versions are way better, before they got revised.

My favorite girl detective, however, was always Trixie Belden. "The Mystery of the Emeralds" was my favorite. Although not quite as independent as Nancy, Trixie was always so much more real.

Um, anyway -- yeah, I'm a book geek.

These are just the highlights, I have about 1800 more I could recommend ... !!

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jen

"It's one of the most serious things that can possibly happen to one in a battle -- to get one's head cut off." -- LC

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