A Young Girl's Favorite Books

I've noticed a lot of lists with books for girls on Pinterest lately and it got me thinking about my favorite books growing up.  This is just a quick list of some of my favorites when I was young.  

As I thought about the books I would want to include, I realized there were five main ways I found these stories.  They were either books we had at home, books at my grandmother's house, books teachers and librarians read to us at school, books I found in the school library, books I found in the public library or books I learned about because the families I babysat for had them and read them to the kids at bedtime.

Here's a few of my favorites - 

The Country Bunny and the Little Gold Shoes by DuBose Heyward and Marjorie Flack -  This is one of my daughter’s current favorite books.  I gave it to her for Easter and she has wanted to read it regularly, insisting on it migrating from her bedroom to the downstairs and back up at night.  We had a copy when I was a child.  I always remembered it but couldn’t think of the title.  Then I worked with an amazing children’s librarian a decade ago and started describing it to her, or at least what I could remember.  She recognized it instantly and told me it was probably the best Easter book for children ever written.  It was surprisingly ahead of the times back in 1937.  The Country Bunny is a single mom with 21 children.  She always wanted to be an Easter Bunny but she had children and life got away from her.  Now her children are a little older and she has honed all the skills Grandfather Bunny is looking for in an Easter Bunny while raising her children. 

Bobbsey Twins in Rainbow Valley by Laura Lee Hope  – This was a little book that I found in my grandmother’s house and I loved reading it every time I was there.  The two sets of twins, Flossie and Freddie and Bert and Nan, go on vacation with their parents to Rainbow Valley.  Many mildly scary adventures befall them on their trip.  I think the adventure on vacation angle appealed to my mind because I was on vacation at my grandmother’s house.  I read once that kids are naturally fascinated with twins and I certainly was.

The Little House on the Prairie series by Laura Ingalls Wilder – There’s something about reading a book while you’re sick that makes it more vivid and that’s how I read these books as a child.  They were wonderful, simple, stories.  I think my favorites were The Little House in the Big Woods, On the Banks of Plum Creek and By The Shores of Silver Lake or even The Long Winter.  Oh, I loved them all.  I was always avidly interested in history, partly because my grandmother lived in such an old house.  These stories often related to things I had seen at my grandmother's house, like old tools and cooking implements.  I can’t wait to share them with my daughter.

The Fire Cat – This was one of my favorite books when I was little.  We had a copy at home and I’ve never forgotten it.  I've seen it here in the library a number of times and just saw a new copy being added to the system.  Who wouldn't love a cat named Pickles?  It's a true adventure with a cat who has too much time on his paws.  Mrs. Goodkind adopts brings him into her home but before you know it he is up a tree and she has to call the fire department who save, adopt and redeem this troubled cat. 

 

The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett - I think my recollections of this story could be a little bit mixed up with the movie at this point but I still remember the soft green of this paperback copy and the softness of the pages for some reason.  The story never got old for me.  Mary is an orphan after her parents die of Cholera in India.  She is frail and sickly but when she goes to stay with her uncle on the moor in England, the garden she finds helps her return to health even as she helps it.  There's another secret in the house that Mary brings to light as well.  I bought a big hardcover copy of this book some years ago, hoping I would have a child to share it with eventually.  My mother found it and read it just a few years ago and I think she enjoyed as much as I ever did. Who wouldn't like a little bit of Earth to call their own? And how much better if it's a secret garden with a hidden door in a high wall?  It's the magic of nature.

Little Women by Louisa May Alcott – Meg, Beth, Jo and Amy are being raised by their mother, Marmee, while their father is away as a chaplain during the Civil War.  Really, reading the summary of this book, one might not think it a book for a young girl, but it is a wholesome story and appropriate for any age that can read it, I think.  Perhaps because this book grew out of Alcott's own childhood, it seems to ring with truth.  There are some tremendously high ideals and philosophies shared in this lovely story, as when Marmee tells the girls, "Money is a needful and precious thing,--and, when well used, a noble thing,--but I never want you to think it is the first or only prize to strive for. I'd rather see you poor men's wives, if you were happy, beloved, contented, than queens on thrones, without self-respect and peace."  I also enjoyed Little Men and Jo’s Boys, but not like the first one.

Chronicles of Narnia: The Voyage of the Dawn Treader - I don't remember when I first read one of the Chronicles of Narnia but I know that by the time I left grade school, I had bought my own little paperback boxed set of the books because I loved them so much.  The Voyage of the Dawn Treader take Lucy and Edmund back to Narnia with their unpleasant cousin, Eustace.  They end up on a ship with their old friend Caspian, now King and go on a voyage with him to find the seven lost lords of Narnia.  This isn't a simple or easy tale but a journey worth taking.  I've enjoyed all the other books in this series too.  The Silver Chair is the first book in the series that I read and the gloomy character of Puddleglum, the Marshwiggle, will always hold a special place in my heart.    

A Wind in the Door by Madeline L’Engle - This is actually book two in a series but it is my favorite, perhaps because I read it first.  Fall in New England is one of my favorite places and seasons, which makes the setting perfect in this book.  Meg is worried about her little brother, precocious Charles Wallace, and her fears are confirmed when it is revealed that there is a war of good and evil being waged in Charles Wallace's mitochondria.  She and her friend Calvin must travel into microscopic space to save Charles Wallace.  Really, the other two books, A Wrinkle in Time and A Swiftly Tilting Planet are just as good but I think the budding romance in this one appealed to me as a young teen.

The Dark is Rising by Susan Cooper – This is one that I re-read every few years.  I was introduced to this series, and in particular this book, because I was babysitting for a family who was reading a chapter every evening at bedtime.  On his 11th birthday, also Midwinter day, Will Stanton awakes to a rarity where he lives, it is snowing, heavily.  The silence that envelopes the countryside is eerily reflected in his own house as no one will awake.  Will goes to find out what is happening and learns that he is the last of the old ones, born to stop the dark from rising.  It is not only beautifully written and enthralling from the beginning.  I was hooked and the mother lent it to me when they were finished.  I eventually bought my own copy.  It is still one of my favorites and I re-read it periodically.  There is another book which comes first in the series, Over Sea, Under Stone, but you've no doubt noticed that I don't necessarily read a series in order.  I go for whatever is available. This is still my favorite in the series.

The Mystery of the Crimson Ghost by Phyllis A. Whitney – Like most teen girls, I was horse crazy. Of course, it didn’t help that I grew up on the same street where they held horse auctions every other Friday and I walked horses to cool them down after polo matches one year.  I spent years trying to find this book again because I didn't have the title quite right.  I finally ran across it and found out it was by none other than Phyllis Whitney.  This was the perfect story for a horse crazed teenager with a love of mysteries.  Janey goes to visit her Aunt Viv on summer vacation and sees a mysterious crimson ghost dog across the lake.  There's also a beautiful horse across the lake.  in order to ride the horse, she'll have to figure out the mystery surrounding the crimson ghost.  

Please feel free to add some of your favorites in the comments.  I always love to hear about books I missed and I’m looking forward to reading a lot of books with my own daughter.

19 Varieties of Gazelle by Naomi Shihab Nye

19 Varieties of Gazelle: Poems of the Middle East

By Naomi Shihab Nye

If you don’t know the poetry of Naomi Shihab Nye, I recommend you give her a try.  This collection of poetry is much like the author, a blending of her Palestinian ex-pat. father and her American mother, sharing her great love of both places. 

It made me think about a very quiet and kind man I had known when I worked for a utility company who spoke of how beautiful the country in the Middle East where he was born is.  He clearly loved that place but I had the distinct impression that he never expected to see it again.  I wondered if he couldn’t go back for political reasons, but I was too shy to ask such a personal question.

This book was published the year after 9/11, and that event affected her deeply, as it did all of us, but somewhat differently than myself.  This book shares the authors feelings and thoughts beautifully.

“September 11, 2001, was not the first hideous day ever in the world, but it was the worst one many Americans had ever lived.  May we never see anther like it.  For people who love the Middle East and have an ongoing devotion to cross-cultural understanding, the day felt sickeningly tragic in more ways than one.”

There is humor and beauty in the collection, as well as the sadness and gravity.

from My Father and the Figtree

“Years passed, we lived in many houses,

none had figtrees,
We had lima beans, zucchini, parsley, beets.
“Plant one!” my mother said,
but my father never did.
He tended garden half-heartedly, forgot to water,
let the okra get too big.
“What a dreamer he is.  Look how many
things he starts and doesn’t  finish.”

The last time he moved, I had a phone call,

my father, in Arabic, chanting a song
I’d never heard. “What’s that?”
He took me out to the new yard.
There, in the middle of Dallas, Texas,
a tree with the largest, fattest,
sweetest figs in the world.
“It’s a figtree song!” he said,
plucking his fruits like ripe tokens,
emblems, assurance
of a world that was always his own.”

It was as if he had to find the tree, rather than planting it himself.

Speaking of her father in the introduction, the author says, “he was a regular customer at the local drugstore soda fountain in his new little town.  ‘He always looked dreamy, preoccupied, like he could see things other people couldn’t see,’ the druggist told me twenty-five years later.  Well yes, I thought.  That’s what immigrants look like.  They always have other worlds in their minds.”

It is Spring here and we watch the rain fall and nourish the new seedlings so that the heat makes them take root and shoot upward.   Perhaps that is why this next poem caught me.

from The Garden of Abu Mahmoud

“He said every morning found him here,

before the water boiled on the flame
he came out to this garden
dug hands into earth, saying, I know you
and earth crumbled rich layers
and this result of their knowing –
 a hillside in which no inch went unsung.
His enormous onions held light
and the trees so weighted with fruits
he tied the branches up.

And he called it querido, Corazon,

all the words of any language
connecting to the deep place
of darkness and seed.  He called it
ya habibi in Arabic, my darling tomato,
and it called him governor, king,
and some days he wore no shoes.”

Her message seems simple, but difficult in this world, peace.  I think it must come from communication and this line caught me in that thought.

from Arabic Coffee

“stay, be seated, follow the talk

wherever it goes.”