Children's books you still love..

[SereneGoose]

Susan Cooper's The Dark is Rising series...

It's still as magical and relevant today, 50 years later..

What's yours?

I've never stopped reading KM Peyton, but I reread all the Flambards books recently and - Christina isn't really that nice, I decided. She and Mark deserved each other really. I prefer many of her other books, though I don't remember rude bits in Dear Fred.

However, it (specifically the Edge of the Cloud) is where I learnt about Bleriot and why I visited the Bleriot memorial when I was I Dover a month ago.

I haven't really reread kids books much on my own but I read lots of my childhood favourites again with/to my kids (even up to age 12/13) including:
The Chronicles of Narnia
Peter Rabbit
The Secret Garden
A Little Princess
The Railway Children
Children of Winter by Berlie Doherty
Roald Dahl esp Boy, Going Solo, Danny the Champion of the world
an obscure one See You Thursday by Jean Ure (because I had a huge crush on my music teacher aged 13-16 lol)

I might start reading them again on my own now my kids are too old.

Love this - I’m right back in my childhood bedroom reading away.

Children’s picture books: Every single Ahlberg’s book, Raymond Briggs, Jill Murphy, Judith Kerr, Shirley Hughes

Absolutely loved When Hitler Stole Pink Rabbit by Judith Kerr, stayed with me.

The Little Prince - so beautiful.

All of Judy Blume including the Fudge series when I was younger and then the rest as I got older. Particularly Are you there God, Deenie and Forever.

Jacqueline Wilson’s books, of course.

Anne Fine particularly Flour Babies and Tiger Eyes.

Rats of Nimh series.

Z for Zachariah - it’s a book I think of every now and then which I must read again as I love dystopian, post-apocalyptic novels as an adult.

Enjoying reading books with my child that I loved. Will be sad when that era of reading to them is over.

Magic Faraway Tree series
Harry Potter

Probably not a teenage book genre by today's standards but I have re-read The Flowers In The Attic series that I first read in my early teens.

Ah, Flowers in the Attic and Lace were passed round school until they fell apart...

And I loved the 'My Story' series which were accounts of historical events from the point if view of the children involved. I wish I still had them, unfortunately they came from the library and I've never seen them second hand.

One I loved and repeatedly borrowed from the library as a child was A Child's Day Through the Ages - as the title suggests, each chapter described a typical day for an English child or children at different times from the Middle Ages up to the early 20th century.

When I found it in a charity shop many years later, I found it was very didactic, obviously intended to instruct rather than tell a story about each of the characters. I've kept the book for the sake of my childhood love for it, rather than because I want to re-read it often.

I loved the Sadlers Wells books, read all of them. I also loved anything by Noel Streatfield, especially White Boots. The Little Princess. Follyfoot farm. The Narnia books. The naughtiest girl by Enid Blyton? The island of adventure. The famous five books. Charlotte Sometimes. Heidi.
I also discovered Hairy Mclary when reading them to my youngest and loved them.

and her Handbag too, with moppet in it.

We always say “take two, cos they’re so small”, even my teen boys, who barely remember it’s from when Mary Mary went for afternoon tea with the next door neighbour.

I don’t quite know what to think about that - very glad they’re being republished, but very anxious to think that they’re changing the illustrations - I can remember them so well, and the picture writing. I loved those illustrations. I know Clara V is very good but I don’t like change and it might not look right 😭.

On balance probably better they’re republished as the copies we had were decades old when I was a child! But nervous. I still don’t want to see the updated Quentin Blake illustrations for the roald dahls I had from before they collaborated more (Charlie, Danny the champion of the world). I do recognise I have a problem!

was that about Queen Elizabeth 1?

Oh and the three books in the Toymakers series by Ursula Moray! Did anyone else read them? I was fascinated by them.

Black Beauty by Anna Sewell and The Railway Children by E Nesbitt. I read both of these as a child and never realised at the time that I was reading a classic!

I remember the (very short) Peregrine Piecrust books, where Peregrine gets square eyes from watching too much TV; birds nest in his hair when he refuses to have it cut, and so on.

Also the Jeremy James books, as he tries to make sense of the mad world in which grown-ups live.
Jeremy James: (in church, his voice echoing round) Mummy, why is everybody whispering?
Mummy: (in an uncomfortable whisper) Because you're not supposed to talk loudly in church.
(Moments later, the vicar addresses the people loudly, and everyone starts singing very loudly)

Those books are so bleak and twisted, aren't they? Funny to see this mentioned as I thought of them only yesterday as I was in the process of rereading Shirley Jackson's 'We have always lived in the castle'. It was the arsenic poisoning that reminded me.

They really are! Some of my gentler natured friends were reading Sweet Valley High but there was me with my incestuous, poisoning, murdery super dark book! Good times!

I read Flowers in the Attic series when I was about 12. It was my first time reading about an incestuous relationship!

Tom's Midnight Garden
A Traveller in Time (bit of a theme developing here)
Five Children and It
The Family from One End Street

……and so many more. I was (am) a total bookworm. Weirdly, though, the Antonia Forest books passed me by - although I was approximately the right age for them - until about 15 years ago when I bought a copy of Autum Term from a jumble-sale for 10p, as it looked interesting. I was then hooked and thought I'd buy all the rest of the series. Ha! A considerable number of pounds later, I did eventually have them all, but I was a lot poorer by then.

I loved The Family From One End Street and sequels! My daughter went on to love them as well.

I don't know if you've got it, but Spring Term by Sally Hayward is very good. https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/1847451160?ref_=ppx_hzsearch_conn_dt_b_fed_asin_title_1

It was the school book from the Katy series I really liked. So much so that I traced all the US locations from maps and images of what they would have looked like then (yes, I'm a geek).

I also did the same thing with Jean Slaughter-Doty's Can I get there by Candlelight - one of the horse books I so liked as a kid. That location on Long Island is eminently traceable. There's a corresponding estate right next to a place called Babylon that's explicitly named in the novel.

Back to Coolidge: I am sure that, like Clover, I had a girlhood crush on Rose Red! She's wonderful and I absolutely loved her. (And the crush is very obvious, as is the Alison and Miss Quentin thing in Second Formers at St Clare's. I think that is one of the most poignant, sensitive scenarios Blyton has ever written).

I didn't like Malory Towers at all. The girls were such bullies and so cliquey - the horse Thunder and the 'mannish' Miss Peters were the only remotely likeable characters.

Anne Digby's Trebizon series was great, though. I loved the high-stakes plagiarism affair in First Term and Rebecca Mason's relationship with the Principal Madeleine Welbeck was very subtle and moving.

Miss Grayling, on the other hand, I could cheerfully have drowned in the pool!

@sueelleker I was so excited to get Spring Term but it only hit the 'right notes' sporadically for me, much of it felt like someone trying but not entirely succeeding to fully match AF's voice. I still enjoyed it for what it was.

I preferred Malory Towers to St Clare's because I thought the O'Sullivan twins lacked personality. Some of the other St Clare's characters were interesting, though.

Oh, they were lovely! I think I still have those somewhere.

It was the school book from the Katy series I really liked. So much so that I traced all the US locations from maps and images of what they would have looked like then (yes, I'm a geek).

I adored What Katy Did at School - agree it’s by far the best of the series. I particularly loved the Christmas chapter where they get the boxes of presents from home. What’s interesting about it is that the girls behave in recognisably ‘teenage girl’ ways, which seems quite progressive for the time - I recall they are always getting crushes on/trying to impress the boys from the neighbouring boys’ school!

It was the school book from the Katy series I really liked. So much so that I traced all the US locations from maps and images of what they would have looked like then (yes, I'm a geek).

Me too and then I moved to the US (in Boston where Rose Red was living after she married) and finally understood the cold of winter she described and the food in the parcel from home. I think I might reread What Katy Did at School this weekend.