Old Children's Book Poll

[rachelmanija]

Here are some old children's books I have acquired. Please vote for which I should read next (or which I should avoid.) If you've read any of them, what did you think?

Poll #26528 Old Children's Book Poll

Open to: Registered Users, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 129

View Respondents

Which books should I read next?

View Answers

Understood Betsy, by Dorothy Canfield Fisher. A girl is sent to rural Vermont and experiences country life.
32 (24.8%)

Building Blocks, by Cynthia Voigt. A boy time-travels and meets his father as a boy.
22 (17.1%)

Juniper, by Monica Furlong. A princess studies with her wise-woman aunt.
50 (38.8%)

Mossflower, by Brian Jacques. Martin the Warrior vs en evil cat queen.
24 (18.6%)

Castaways in Lilliput, by Henry Winterfield. Three shipwrecked kids land in Lilliput.
17 (13.2%)

Midsummer, by Katherine Adams. Two New York kids are sent to Sweden & experience Swedish life.
20 (15.5%)

Orphan Island, by Laurel Snyder. Kids live alone on an island.
23 (17.8%)

Mariel of Redwall, by Brian Jacques. Finally a heroine.
25 (19.4%)

The Fairy Caravan, by Beatrix Potter. A miniature animal traveling circus.
19 (14.7%)

A Room Made of Windows, by Eleanor Cameron. Teenage Julia wants to be a writer.
18 (14.0%)

When Hitler Stole Pink Rabbit, by Judith Kerr. Anna and her family are refugees in multiple countries.
30 (23.3%)

Hyddenworld, by William Horwood. Two kids find a civilization of tiny people and magic.
23 (17.8%)

Assignment in Alaska (Kathy Martin), by Josephine James. A stewardess has an Alaska adventure.
9 (7.0%)

Talargain, by Joyce Gard. Northumberland selkie fantasy.
45 (34.9%)

Comments

[lirazel]

I voted for the two Redwall books, because I did enjoy those books very much as a kid, and also for Juniper. I just read Wise Blood, to which Juniper is a sequel, and I loved it. So I'm going to read Juniper as well as soon as I can get my hands on it.

Since your blog is a wonderful place to talk about children's fiction: have you or anyone else reading this ever read the Gone-Away Lake books? I LOVED those as a kid but I realized I don't know of anyone else who's read them.

[osprey_archer]

I read the first Gone-Away Lake book just a year or two ago and I loved it! (AND it was illustrated by the same husband-wife illustration team that illustrated the Borrowers books in the US, which illustrations I poured over as a child, so seeing that style again was such a nostalgic moment even though I'd never seen those particular illustrations before.) Haven't read the sequel yet, though.

[lirazel]

Yes! I love those illustrators so so much! They did such good work with both series! And their style was so well suited to kids’ books.

I’m so pleased someone else loves Gone-away! Perhaps I’ll reread them this year for the first time in twenty some years!

[stranger]

Oh, yes, the Gone-Away Lake books were great to read (as an almost-teen, long ago), the second as much as the first. The same author has another couple of books The Saturdays and sequel, about another family of children. There are conflicts and whatnot, but overall they're all just halcyon.

[queenbookwench]

I’ve not read Gone-Away Lake, but I have read Enright’s Melendy family books and they are delight!

They move from NYC to the country at beginning of book 2, so there are city kid adventures in book 1 (The Saturdays) and city-kids-discovering-the-country adventures in book 2 (The Four Story Mistake); the 3rd book (And Then There Were Five) is a bit more serious than the others and includes some actual peril.

[copperfyre]

I love When Hitler Stole Pink Rabbit as a kid, and I think it’s actually a good book, too. It’s a very good kids-view-of-life book, and cosy despite the historical context.

I also adored the Brian Jacques book (but make absolutely no claims about them being actually good) and reread Mossflower so many times that my copy completely fell apart. In retrospect, I imprinted very hard on it and continue to love basically all of the tropes it contains. I also loved Mariel of Redwall, because finally a heroine! And a heroine that goes around winning her battles by hitting her enemies with a rope with a big knot tied in it, delightful.

[starlady]

I read both of them as a kid and liked them a lot! I should reread them.

[lirazel]

Yeah, I just pulled my copies off the shelf!

[hippogriff13]

I also read a number of books by Elizabeth Enright as a child. These included at least one of the "Gone-Away Lake" series, but I don't recall anything about it, including why or how the lake had gone away. Unless that was the book (not sure if it was by Enright or not) in which the child protagonists were friends with an elderly lady who'd been in some sort of accident in her teens(?) and lost all her childhood memories. So she was in this weird "stranger in a strange land" situation despite being from a bigshot local family and having lived in the same house all her life, since her conscious memories started from scratch at near-adulthood and she wound up never feeling like she really fit in with her family or contemporaries (most of whom I think were dead by the time she became friendly with the child protagonists). The old lady's long-missing memories were eventually triggered by some boating-related(?) incident near the end of the book, so her long-lost childhood was effectively restored to her.

Anyway, "The Four-Story Mistake" and "The Saturdays" sound much more familiar to me than "Gone-Away Lake," assuming the latter isn't the book described above. I think I probably read each of those two Enright titles at least twice (not unusual for me if I liked a book, since the children's section of our local public library wasn't exactly huge and I often resorted to rereading things I'd liked the first time around). I think one of those two Enright books--probably "Four-Story Mistake"--involved a quest for some means of getting into the multi-windowed cupola on top of the rambling old house the kids had just moved into, which had been mysteriously closed off years before. (The cupola, not the entire house.) But that vaguely "The Velvet Room"-like plot thread is about the only detail I recall relatively clearly about that series either after all these years.