Though this blog is no longer active, for over a decade I shared weekly reviews of excellent children’s books here. So this site is a full library of books worth exploring.
If you’re new here, I encourage you to Browse the Library, where you can search for books by age, genre, format, season, and so much more! You can also look through the Bookshop for recommendations, or you can pick up a copy of Wild Things and Castles in the Sky, a collection of essays all about books, books, and more children’s books. (I helped co-edit this, and I think you’ll enjoy it.)
You could also visit the About page to learn more about why I started this blog, and what I think makes a book worth sharing. And you can read all about the Big Story right here. It’s the only reason I do any of this.
If you’re interested in what I’m up to now, please join me at the The Setting, my free Substack publication. I’m still recommending good books over there, but I’m sharing a few other things these days as well.
When it comes to allegories, people have Opinions. Some readers find them unbearably cheesy, which is, I guess, understandable: few things grate on the nerves like a story that’s too handholdy—the kind that tells us what we’re supposed to think about every element of the story. And allegories can certainly come across as handholdy. There’s no dodging it: every allegory mentioned in this post features characters whose names explicitly tell you what they’re meant to represent within the story.
But you know what? I love allegories. I love the way they take an abstract truth and, by portraying it as a character, bring it to life. Allegories give those truths structure and presence—they give them a body. And I love what allegories do in our hearts as our family reads them: they give us illustrations we can return to when faced with a difficult moment. “Remember when Little Pilgrim strayed from the path?” we might say. “This situation is kind of like that because . . .”
When reading Little Pilgrim’s Progress we’re reminded that our life is not a linear line but a journey, filled with moments of peril and conviction as well as rest and peace. When reading Hinds’ Feet on High Places, we remember that our Shepherd is just a call away and that he’ll come bounding down the mountainside to our help when we call. Of course the best stories can also have this effect, allegorical or not, but allegories excel at it: they give us something concrete to picture in those moments when our vision is clouded by grief or discouragement or doubt.
So, here are a few of our family’s favorites. There’s a little something on this list for all age levels, so I’ve organized it from the ones written for the littlest readers to the ones written for the biggest.
This adaptation takes the big truths of John Bunyan’s classic Pilgrim’s Progress and translates them into characters and images that are accessible for young readers. Joe Sutphin’s illustrations in this edition open them up further. (Read the full review.)
Tales of the Kingdom was written in the eighties (you can see it in the artwork), which makes this one feel the most like modern life. These books are full of delightful stories and a prince we all long to know better. (Read the full review.)
Hannah Hurnard’s tale of Much-Afraid and her journey to the High Places is one worth meditating upon and savoring. My older daughters love this one; I keep a copy by my bed so I can read a little each day. (Read the full review.)
The grand-daddy of allegories, Pilgrim’s Progress follows Christian as he journeys from the City of Destruction to the City of Light—and is waylaid, challenged, or fortified by those he meets along the way. This edition features updated language and some annotation that makes John Bunyan’s old-school language open up for modern readers. Another point in its favor? It’s so pretty!
Sometimes, you need a short read-aloud, one you can pick up and read here and there—at the park, say, or on a trip. You can’t commit months of your family’s life to reading it, and you need to be able to put it down for a few days or even a few weeks. Or you just need a book you can finish quickly. What I’m saying is: there’s a time for reading all seven Narnia books aloud, and there’s a time for reading a collection of Father Brown stories.
For us, this is lunchtime on the weekends, when I like to read to my daughters something different—something short that we can pick up and put down during the week without losing our place. And so we’ve found a few short read-alouds worth sharing, gems that are fun to return to when we can return to them but that don’t shame us if we miss a few days here and there. Without further ado:
These adaptations of some of G.K. Chesterton’s best-known Father Brown stories are beautifully written and a delight to read aloud. My daughters loved the mystery of each one, as well as the clever illustrations, and they belly-laughed in all the right places.
Set in the world of Tumbleweed Thompson, these historical fiction tales will make you laugh and—well, mostly laugh. Really hard. Beloved characters from The Misadventured Summer of Tumbleweed Thompson surface here and there throughout the stories, and while each story is different, they’re all an awful lot of fun. (McCarty’s Dead-Eye Dan and the Cimarron Kid is also a great, short read-aloud.)
James Witmer’s sweet stories of backyard life have long been a favorite around our lunch table. Beside the Pond follows his A Year in the Big Old Garden and centers on Ferdinand the smallest bullfrog in the world, who watches the happenings in and around his pond. These are delightful, lightly illustrated stories that will have kids looking under leaves and into puddles for new friends like Ferdinand.
Speaking of enchanting animals stories, this one is just about perfect. An anthology of Herriot’s tales of veterinary practice adapted for young readers and illustrated with gorgeous watercolors, this book tells a handful of stories about Herriot’s life as a country vet in the 1930s. Whatever the age of your readers, there’s something in this book for everyone to love. (Read the full review.)
We are weeks into a stay-at-home order here in Washington—I don’t even know how many weeks. Six? A lot. We are a lot of weeks in.
And while there are days when we feel desperate for the friends, family, and church community living outside our walls, and days when the news weighs so heavily on me that it’s almost physically painful, there are also ways in which we’ve settled into new routines. We have celebrated everything from Easter to May the Fourth (and four family birthdays) since the order took effect, and it hasn’t been horrible. Some of us have taken up crochet; some have formed an alliance with watercolor pencils. We have gardened a lot. And we finally—after months of squeezing it in around ballet lessons and youth group and home group and evenings out—finished Farmer Boy.
Reading aloud has become one of the sweet spots in our days again. We did not forsake it when the girls started school again—oh, no. But we did not have time to read as much as we had read before, and that was one of the things I missed most. These weeks of enclosure have been softened by lots of little excursions into stories and the discussions that have sprung from them.
I thought it would be fun, then, to compile a short list of great family read-alouds for this particular season—books that will appeal to a wide variety of ages, that you’ll want to sit down to night after night, that will make your world feel a little bigger and broader right now.
Our lives looked different then: the dining table dominated the kitchen instead of presiding over its own glorious, sunny room. The girls were in school, so Elevenses wasn’t a thing yet (what it is will make sense if you read on). Most notably, there was no Josie yet, though if my math is right, I must have been growing her when that last post was published.
Our family reading life looks different now: Lydia is 11, Josie is 3, and Sarah and Phoebe fit neatly between them. Our lives orbit that funky formica table as we school and eat there many times each day. No babies need to nurse mid-reading (though the little sisters are rather free range at times); we are in a New Season. I thought I’d give you a glimpse of when we read aloud now, with slightly older kids and a school schedule to factor in.
Note: I started writing this post during the school year but am publishing it now, after the school year’s end. Things already look different than they sound below—bedtime remains unchanged, and the lunchtime reading remains, though it often happens over a picnic at our favorite park and Heidi has given way to Treasure Island.
Early Mornings
Mitch and I still wake early. At the time of writing, we don’t wake before the sun, but the sun wakes obscenely early up here this time of year. Who wants to compete with that?
We drink tea (green for me; Earl Grey for him) and read our Bibles and pray over the coming day together. Then he works and I write until 6:20 or so, when I pop in my earbuds and work out like nobody’s watching.
At 7, the girls emerge from their rooms, wild-haired and full of questions about life and our schedule for the day and have we seen the cat. The starting gun sounds, and we’re off.
Elevenses
By 10:30, Mitch has left for the day and the older girls and I have finished their individual lessons. They’ve both had a brush with math and language arts; they’ve logged a solid fifteen minutes at the piano and done some assigned reading. Maybe we’ve squeezed in a drawing lesson by then or nature study, or maybe we spent that extra time feeling big feelings and taking a walk to sort those out.
But by 10:30, we’re back at the table with a stack of books. We call this time Elevenses, because we eat like hobbits while it happens.
After we pray, sing a hymn, recite our memory verse, read the Bible together and read a poem, the girls stow their binders (with sighs of joy! And relief!) and go grab their fancy dessert plates from the kitchen. Earlier, I piled them high with popcorn, pistachios, dried apricots, and fancy flavored marshmallows, and now they carry their bounty to the table, where they sip tea and nibble tiny, time-consuming snacks as I read book after book aloud.
Immediately after Elevenses, one lucky daughter makes lunch. There may or may not be conflict over this; there may or may not be tears. But eventually, lunch reaches the table, and while the girls eat, I read aloud to them from a novel. Lately, it’s been Heidi.Heidi has become such an inextricable part of our lunch routine that Josie recently asked me, “After we eat lunch and read Heidi, then what are we going to do today?”
Evening
The afternoon passes in a blur of probable park dates and possible lessons. But after dinner, all six of us settle in on our bed and read together from The Gospel Story Bible, by Marty Machowski. After that, the big girls say goodnight to me and rush upstairs with Mitch, where they throw themselves on the floor with art supplies and draw while he reads from The Return of the King.
I, meanwhile, curl up with Phoebe and Josie and read to them from a novel more their speed. Currently, we’re reading The Rise and Fall of Mount Majestic. Then I tuck them in and take my book (Sister Bernadette’s Barking Dog) to an armchair, where I read until one of them gets up needing to potty, then again until one of them gets up needing a band-aid, and again until one of them wants a drink of water.
Eventually, all falls quiet. Mitch comes downstairs, and we watch a show maybe, or eat frozen mangos and talk.
When we go to bed, we bring our books (David Copperfield for him), and close the day when we can no longer hold those books upright but the words begin swimming sleepily as we doze. We turn the lights off. Our day ends.
