Items15The creator’s order
  1. 1PADDY CLARKE HA HA HA (1993)PADDY CLARKE HA HA HA (1993)Published Jan 1, 1993Ten-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…0
  2. 2Rabbit cake (2017)Rabbit cake (2017) 4.0/10 on Open LibraryPublished Jan 1, 2017Elvis 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…0
  3. 3Room (2010)Room (2010) 8.1/10 on Open LibraryPublished Jan 1, 2010To 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…0
  4. 4We Need New Names (2013)We Need New Names (2013) 6.0/10 on Open LibraryPublished Jan 1, 2013Darling 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…0
  5. 5Pigeon English (2011)Pigeon English (2011) 4.0/10 on Open LibraryPublished Jan 1, 2011Harri 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.…0
  6. 6Girlchild (2012)Girlchild (2012)Published Jan 1, 2012Rory 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…0
  7. 7I'm Not Scared (2010)I'm Not Scared (2010)Published Jan 1, 2010Nine-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…0
  8. 8The Selected Works of T. S. Spivet (2009)The Selected Works of T. S. Spivet (2009) 8.0/10 on Open LibraryPublished Jan 1, 2009T. 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…0
  9. 9Sisters by a river (1947)Sisters by a river (1947)Published Jan 1, 1947The 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…0
  10. 10The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie (2009)The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie (2009) 6.7/10 on Open LibraryPublished Jan 1, 2009Eleven-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…0