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1
PADDY CLARKE HA HA HA (1993)
Published
Ten-year-old Paddy can tell you where he and his friend left their names in wet cement. He has a harder time making sense of why his parents argue and then go on as if nothing happened. The play and the worry arrive in the order he notices them. Choose this for a child’s voice that lets you recognize a family change before he has words for it.
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Rabbit cake (2017)
4.0/10on Open Library
Published
Elvis Babbitt trusts facts, so she tries to give grief a timetable after her mother drowns. Then her sister starts eating in her sleep and her father begins wearing her mother’s bathrobe. Elvis can report exactly what happens without knowing how to explain it. The dry humor makes the family’s grief harder to reduce to any one feeling.
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Room (2010)
8.1/10on Open Library
Published
To five-year-old Jack, the room he shares with Ma is the world, and the television gives him a different kind of reality. Pay attention to the names he uses for the things he lives among. They tell you how much sense his home makes to him, even as you understand why Ma needs the two of them to get out. Captivity and abuse make this a tense read.
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We Need New Names (2013)
6.0/10on Open Library
Published
Darling begins at ten, playing invented games with friends and hunting for guavas in a wealthy neighborhood in Zimbabwe. Later, life in America gives her new ways to see both places. Watch what the names children give their games tell you about the adult world they have been listening to. The book follows Darling into her teenage years.
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Pigeon English (2011)
4.0/10on Open Library
Published
Harri draws Adidas stripes on his shoes and pays attention to a pigeon that lands on his balcony. Those details share space with his attempt to investigate a killing on his London housing estate. His excitement and his incomplete sense of the danger can pull the same scene in different directions. The book’s slang rewards slowing down and listening.
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Girlchild (2012)
Published
Rory Hendrix reads the Girl Scout handbook for ideas about how to get out of the Reno trailer park where she lives. Diary entries, family letters, and official reports offer other ways of describing the same life. Follow where Rory’s humor pushes against language adults use to sum up a girl in her situation. Some of her experiences are hard to read.
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I'm Not Scared (2010)
Published
Nine-year-old Michele and his friends range through wheat fields during a hot Italian summer. What he finds at an abandoned farmhouse begins to change the meaning of familiar adults’ behavior. Jonathan Hunt’s translation is a good choice if you want a short, tense novel where a discovery matters because the only witness still has to live among the people implicated.
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The Selected Works of T. S. Spivet (2009)
8.0/10on Open Library
Published
T. S. Spivet is twelve and already maps things most people would never think to diagram, including conversations around the dinner table. A call from the Smithsonian sends him on a trip from Montana, with drawings and notes in the margins of the story. Read the maps alongside the prose. Their precision can tell you what he’s trying to get a grip on.
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Sisters by a river (1947)
Published
The girls take lessons under an ash tree beside the Avon. Later, the ivy is taking over and the household comes apart. Comyns’s young storyteller gives both changes their place in the family’s routines. Choose it for the strange, funny details childhood keeps long after a tidy account of the same years would have discarded them.
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The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie (2009)
6.7/10on Open Library
Published
Eleven-year-old Flavia de Luce tells her story as a keen chemist with a laboratory in the family house. Her curiosity makes a dead bird and a stamp on its beak irresistible. Read it for a child narrator who can examine physical evidence with confidence while still having plenty to learn about the adults who left it behind.
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The Trouble With Goats and Sheep (2015)
8.0/10on Open Library
Published
During the hot English summer of 1976, ten-year-old Grace and her friend Tilly decide to look for a missing neighbor. The book also makes room for adult perspectives, so you can compare what the girls take literally with what the people on their street are trying to avoid. Grace’s point of view makes ordinary talk near the front door worth following.
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Bastard Out of Carolina (1992)
8.8/10on Open Library
Published
Bone Boatwright tells the story of her family in South Carolina as a twelve-year-old trying to understand what has happened to her. She is attentive to the ways kin can offer safety and exert pressure at the same time. The point of view gives those ties a force they might lose in an adult explanation. The book includes severe child abuse, including sexual abuse.
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Only Child (2018)
Published
After a school shooting, six-year-old Zach tries to make sense of what his family is going through. One of his practical ideas is to give different feelings separate colors on a page. Notice how an ordinary child’s vocabulary can describe something sadness alone would miss. The circumstances make this a particularly painful family story.
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The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time (2002)
7.9/10on Open Library
Published
Fifteen-year-old Christopher sets out to find out who killed a neighbor’s dog. He numbers his chapters with primes and keeps track of details other people would leave out of a mystery. The turning points ask you to read what he writes as evidence about his family as well as about the case. The opening includes the death of an animal.
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The Bluest Eye (1970)
8.4/10on Open Library
Published
Claudia is one of several voices through whom you come to know Pecola Breedlove. Notice what Claudia’s childhood resistance to the beauty adults praise can tell you about Pecola’s wish for blue eyes. The shifts in viewpoint make it possible to see how a child’s individual wish takes shape in an entire community. The novel includes racist violence and sexual abuse.
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