Did you enjoy books from this list? Want some more? Check it out...
1) "Moccasin Trail" by Eloise Jarvis McGraw
More sensitive than some of the pioneer stories we've been reading lately is this one about pre–Gold Rush Oregon and a white boy brought up as an Indian. With the years of Crow residence that came after accidental separation from his Missouri family behind him, young Jim Keath is at a loss about his future. He helps his now-orphaned brothers and sisters settle in the Willamette Valley, and there's exciting reading in the joint Indian-frontiersman problems that must be solved before Jim can fully understand his dependence on Crow legend and medicine, re-channel it, and become a true white man.
2) "Tom's Midnight Garden" by Philippa Pearce
The enchantment of a secret garden in which time dissolves like English mist permeates this lyrical story of young Tom's nightly return to Victorian days, to Hatty, and to the house of secrets. For as sure as there was a thirteenth hour there was Hatty, the orphan who nightly beckoned to the twentieth century English boy. A lyrical and poignant fantasy reminiscent of Portrait of Jennie and The Secret Garden, this book which has been selected as the British children's book of 1959 contains a great deal of imagination and grace, rarely encountered in recent children's work. Susan Einzig's sensitive black and white illustrations add another dimension to the intense aesthetic appeal of Tom's delicate flight into fancy.
3) "My Side of the Mountain" by Jean Craighead George
An exciting and evocative book about a young boy who decides to live the life of Thoreau throughout a year in the Catskills. The author, who has written extensively on nature, comes to basic grips with the facts of nature and man's attempt to adapt to its rhythm. The hero-narrator of the book sets off on his venture with text-book wisdom, soon to find that it is a more subtle, more crafty game he must play if he is to survive. And survive he does, meeting each challenge with his characteristic blend of humor, intelligence, and humility. A vivid character at the vortex of convincing and real adventure. Heroics? None, but of heroism, young Master Gribley has an ample share.
4) "Gone-Away Lake" by Elizabeth Enright
An engaging family story by the author-illustrator of the Melendy adventures (see
Spider Web for Two, etc.) takes Portia Blake, 10, through an exciting ummer of detecting and discovery with her 12 year old and very nature-minded cousin Julian Jarman. It is the Jarmans who live in the country and the Blake children, Portia and her six year old brother Foster, who wish they could. What makes this eventually possible is Portia's and Julian's discovery of what is now literally a swamp but what used to be a lake bordered by elegant houses, one of which is still inhabited. Mrs. Cheever and her brother Pindar Payton are its inhabitants and with them come the by-products- long skirts, knickers, potted palms and friendliness- of a by gone age. As their past unfolds it also leads to a bit of present reclamation and an other of the fascinating old houses becomes a possible future home for the Blakes.
5) "The Egypt Game" by Zilpha Keatley Snyder
Offbeat kids, in dialogue, ingenious pretense and attendant complications--all the elements for ten, eleven-year-old enjoyment, and then a problem: a criminally insane killer of children. April, an insecure sophisticate, and Melanie, a sensible Negro girl of compatible imagination, transform a deserted back yard into the land of Egypt, and themselves into votaries of ancient rites. The Egypt Game is not only "a terrific game," but also "a life unknown to grown-ups and lived by kids alone." At its height, the wanton murder of a child occurs in the vicinity, and the adults refuse to let the children out to play. But. surveillance relaxes eventually, the ceremonies resume (with new recruits), and on a late night visit to the lot, April is attacked--something grabs her out of the darkness, fingers close on her mouth and throat. She is saved by the shouts of an elderly antique dealer who had been a suspect; the assailant is identified and sent to an institution. The danger to April and the subsequently revealed life story of the antique dealer motivate the solution of most of everybody's family problems, and Melanie and April (much humanized) plan further imaginative adventures. The heterogeneous composition of a university community in California contributes to the subtle (sometimes suspicious, ultimately enriching) relationships among the children, and their Egyptian absorption is all too real. But objections remain: the antique dealer is the stock suspect-turned-sympathetic-sage, and the demented killer is both tangential to the plot and a questionable component in a book for this age. As Melanie says, this is "the kind of thing parents tell their children when they're alone together." Because the episode is handled with restraint, We can only question, not condemn; the decision is yours.
6) "Otto of the Silver Hand" by Howard Pyle
The classic story of the simple-witted Otto, whose virtue conquers the robber barons, is now available in smaller size with the original illustrations by the author.
7) "The Midnight Fox" by Betsy Byars
A nine-year-old boy with a sense of humor is hard enough to bring to the printed page (or snag in a library), but if you'll latch on to a live one, Betsy Byars has his match. Tommy is not the first hung-up juvenile hero but he is one of the best, and he remembers that summer with Aunt Millie, Uncle Fred and Hazeline with straight-from-the-(skinny)-shoulder sincerity. A non-athlete who knows animals come from miles around just to chase him, he deplores the idea of summer on a farm while his parents bicycle through Europe and friend Perle stays at home. But he goes ("Control," his father says) and spends the first two days saying he's "just fine" and wondering when they'll stop asking. It's not what he does (see a certain black fox fifteen times, not all included) but how he tells it that makes him such a stand-out, and his digressions (watching an ant on Petie's sneakers, counting hand wrinkles to calculate the day he'll die) are steady, smooth and well-spaced. The laughs are most frequent in the beginning, which gets a reader's attention, and the sly, slow build-up to the final black fox episode is as firm as you could ask for.
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