The children's books worth revisiting at any age
The Bookyol Editors · 6 min read
Some books do more than entertain a child — they build the reader that child becomes. Here are the classics worth pressing into small hands, and rereading with your own grown-up eyes.
Roald Dahl's Matilda is the patron saint of bookish children: a girl neglected by awful parents who finds refuge, and power, in the library. L.M. Montgomery's Anne of Green Gables gives us the most irrepressible heroine in children's literature, an orphan whose imagination turns an ordinary farm into a place of wonder. Frances Hodgson Burnett's The Secret Garden is quieter magic — a sour, lonely girl and a hidden garden healing each other back to life.
No such shelf is complete without E.B. White's Charlotte's Web, which teaches children about friendship, loss, and words in a barn, or Antoine de Saint-Exupery's The Little Prince, a children's book that adults keep rereading for the rest of their lives. And C.S. Lewis's The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe opens the wardrobe door that a century of readers has walked through.
What these books share isn't innocence — several are surprisingly dark. It's respect. They trust children with real feeling, and that trust is exactly why we never outgrow them.
