Which classic?

The The Witch of Blackbird Pond was cool (historical MG)
Also the Bridge to Terabithia.

Disney takes a lot of liberties, so it's likely they are different.

I would second Bridge to Terabithia (although some younger people don't like it because of the ending).

Maybe some of Neil Gaiman's books.

You could also look at some of the Newbery Medal winners and honors (Bridge to Terabithia was a Newbery winner).

RE: The Jungle Book - It's a bit thick, and Kipling shows his era something fierce (somehow simultaneously celebrating India's wildlife while glorifying its destruction and English rule), but you might give it a try. The Disney animated version kept little but the names. (There was a much better, sadly overlooked live-action version in the 1990's starring Jason Scott Lee, though it also deviates significantly from the source material.)

Gary Paulsen's Brian Robeson books begin with the classic survival tale Hatchet - well worth a read, if you haven't.

You mentioned Number the Stars... can't recall if it won any awards, but Jane Yolen's The Devil's Arthimetic deals with the Holocaust, as well, and is widely considered a classic. She's an author you might want to explore; her Pit Dragon Chronicles (a trilogy until fairly recently) are technically sci-fi, but were classified as Fantasy for marketing reasons.

Avi also does some good stuff; The True Confessions of Charlotte Doyle not only won awards, but ended on an uplifting note - which is surprisingly rare, in my reading experience.

Are you looking for modern classics – say the last 20 years or so?

Or classics of children's literature, which very few if any kids read today, but some of which are truly lovely books.

If the latter, I'd suggest Five Children and It by Edith Nesbit. Very English, and written well over a century ago, but anyone writing MG books, especially fantasy, should at least be familiar with it.

Susan Cooper, The Dark Is Rising.

I'd suggest 'From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler' by E.L. Konigsburg. Or her 'Jennifer, Hecate, MacBeth, William McKinley, and me, Elizabeth'. They were her first two books, published in the same year, 1968, when they won a Newbery Medal and Newbery Honor, respectively. If you can only read one. I'd go with 'Mixed-Up Files', but that's personal preference.

A story that resonated hugely with me, when I read it as a kid, was The Boxcar Children, by Gertrude Chandler Warner. It might have been the first actual book-sized book I ever read. And it was an older story, even back then.*

caw


* We won't go into the arithmetic of what "even back then" means, will we?

blacbird said:

A story that resonated hugely with me, when I read it as a kid, was The Boxcar Children, by Gertrude Chandler Warner. It might have been the first actual book-sized book I ever read. And it was an older story, even back then.*

caw


* We won't go into the arithmetic of what "even back then" means, will we?

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We certainly will not.

blacbird said:

A story that resonated hugely with me, when I read it as a kid, was The Boxcar Children, by Gertrude Chandler Warner. It might have been the first actual book-sized book I ever read. And it was an older story, even back then.*

caw


* We won't go into the arithmetic of what "even back then" means, will we?

Click to expand...

We certainly will not.

JustSarah said:

What is Escape To Witch Mountain considered? I didn't know it was actually a book first, though I'm not surprised.

I bet the book is so much better. Plus it has sequels, which is strangly ... reassuring actually. This is bringing back memories of movie adaptations I wish I forgotten.:/ More the sequels though.

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the televised version is nothing short of awful :-o
the book was remarkably good. a fun read.

another from yesteryear is Oliver Twist
good, entertaining read by Dickens, though perhaps one too many plot twists

I would go back even a little farther for classic- classics

The Secret Garden and The Little Princess and - Francis Hodgson Burnett
The Borrowers- Mary Norton

For darker, consider Lemony Snicket or Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH.

I love the Chronicles of Narnia, all of Judy Blume (all of the ones that are Middle grade that is), same for Katherine Patterson. Tuck Everlasting is good. Mixed Up Files is one of my favorites. Try Maniac McGee too. It's my nine year old's favorite. Let's not forget Madeline L'Engle and E. B. White.

I'm going to stop here, but I could go on forever.

I read a series in fourth grade that contained a bunch of books with similar cover designs. It included Dinky Hocker and Escape to Witch Mountain along with Freaky Friday and a whole bunch more. I went through them all. I wish I owned them now.

JustSarah said:

I might actually like to compare older and newer classics. There is something specifically I'm looking for: fiction for young people that is darker like adult fiction, but has the voice that sort of gives it away as MG.

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I would recommend Philip Pullman's HIS DARK MATERIALS trilogy, but I'm not sure many people consider it MG because it does get heartwrenchingly dark at the end.

The Phantom Tollbooth. I loved that one. My son loves the Dav Pilkey books, including including the Captain Underpants series, because as he reminds me, he is 12 and 12 year olds love toilet humor. He also loves Beast Quest, Goosebumps and recently Deltora Quest.

That's my boy!!!

I loved TheTrue Confessions of Charlotte Doyle (read several times), The Secret Garden, The Witch of Blackbird Pond (read it until it fell apart), Anne of Green Gables, and Caddie Woodlawn.

One of the great pioneers of Fantasy fiction was Victorian George Macdonald. He wrote books both for adults (Phantastes, Lilith) and for children (The Princess and the Goblin, The Princess and Curdie, At the Back of the North Wind), and all remain wonderfully readable today. I read the three children's books, aloud, to both my kids when they were maybe eight or nine, and they adored them.

As an aside, he was the grandfather, I believe, of early 20th century British mystery writer Philip Macdonald, who is also very good at his chosen craft.

As a newer title, I'd recommend The Never-Ending Story, by the ironically-named Michael Ende.

caw

blacbird said:

The Princess and the Goblin, The Princess and Curdie, At the Back of the North Wind

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... great books. Macdonald: a fine writer, to be sure.