Books in New York Review of Books Children's Collection series

A grandfather clock makes a lovely home for a family of mice—if you don’t mind the occasional clang. And here Hickory lives with his parents, his brother, Dickory, and his sister, Dock. But Hickory is a restless, fearless mouse, and he longs to be on the move, to breathe the sweet air and nibble on the wild strawberries of the fields. So one day in early spring, with the smells of honeysuckle and clover guiding him, he strikes out on his own. Soon he discovers that a meadow can be a lonely place, even with all its beetles and caterpillars. It’s not until Hop the grasshopper comes around that Hickory finds a true companion. Hop warns him, though, that when the days get shorter and the goldenrod begins to fade, the “song she sings will soon be done.” How Hickory and Hop confront and eventually accept the end of summer forms the core of Palmer Brown’s poignant story.Hickory is a story of friendship and love on par with Shel Silverstein’s The Giving Tree or E. B. White’s Charlotte’s Web. It is also a field guide to the common plants and flowers of spring, summer, and autumn, all beautifully rendered in Palmer Brown’s most colorful and joyous drawings.

An emergency meeting of the Mortimer Square Garden Committee has been convened to discuss a most alarming matter: Someone has been digging in the garden and making off with buckets of dirt. Miss Angela Chesney is sure that a gang of boys from run-down Catford Street is to blame. But Angela’s sister, Olivia, isn’t so sure. Olivia has always wondered why the neighborhood children—the “sparrows” she sometimes watches from the window of her house—are kept out of the private garden. Don’t they have a right to enjoy the place, too? But neither Angela nor Olivia has any idea what sent the neighborhood waif Lovejoy Mason and her few friends in search of good, rich earth. Still less do they imagine where their investigation of the incident will lead them—to a struggling restaurant, a bombed-out church, and at the heart of it all, a hidden garden.

New Year’s has passed. Twelfth Night is almost here. Krabat, a fourteen-year-old beggar boy dressed up as one of the Three Kings, is traveling from village to village singing carols. One night he has a strange dream in which he is summoned by a faraway voice to go to a mysterious mill—and when he wakes he is irresistibly drawn there. At the mill he finds eleven other boys, all of them, like him, the apprentices of its Master, a powerful sorcerer, as Krabat soon discovers. During the week the boys work ceaselessly grinding grain, but on Friday nights the Master initiates them into the mysteries of the ancient Art of Arts. One day, however, the sound of church bells and of a passing girl singing an Easter hymn penetrates the boys’ prison: At last a plan is set in motion that will win them their freedom and put an end to the Master’s dark designs. Krabat & the Sorcerer’s Mill was one of Cornelia Funke’s most beloved books as a child, and it is easy to see why. It is a wondrous story of magic, black and white; of courage and cunning; and of high adventure.

A time-travel story that is both a poignant exploration of human identity and an absorbing tale of suspense.It’s natural to feel a little out of place when you’re the new kid, but when Charlotte Makepeace wakes up after her first night at boarding school, she’s baffled: everyone thinks she’s a girl called Clare Mobley, and even more shockingly, it seems she has traveled forty years back in time to 1918. In the months that follow, Charlotte wakes alternately in her own time and in Clare’s. And instead of having only one new set of rules to learn, she also has to contend with the unprecedented strangeness of being an entirely new person in an era she knows nothing about. Her teachers think she’s slow, the other girls find her odd, and, as she spends more and more time in 1918, Charlotte starts to wonder if she remembers how to be Charlotte at all. If she doesn’t figure out some way to get back to the world she knows before the end of the term, she might never have another chance.

A book of creative metamorphosis and stunning visuals that will bend children's imaginations and appeal to all ages. "One of my own personal childhood favorites..." --Brian SelznickThirteen is no ordinary picture book. It is book of visual and conceptual revolutions, metamorphoses, and narratives that swallow their own tails. In thirteen illustrated stories, plus "a preview of coming attractions," nothing less than the birth of the world, its duration, death, and rebirth occurs, in thirteen arresting and evolving tableaus, involving a sinking ship, a play, a leaf and caterpillar, a card trick, swans, a worm, Cinderella, the alphabet, paper magic, pyramids, a getting-thin-and-getting-fat-again dance, the fall and rise of civilization, and a countdown. This is not a book you read from beginning to end, so much as one you enter into, are absorbed by and transformed, like the thirteen tableaus themselves.

By the author of the classic The Snow Goose, a heartbreaking story about a young girl and her most unusual cat, who has magical powers that save her owner's life.Seven-year-old Mary adores her ginger cat, Thomasina, and is crushed when Thomasina falls sick, and Mary’s father, a grim, inflexible man who is the town vet, decrees that the only thing to be done is to put Thomasina down. Mary refuses to speak to her father, and then she herself contracts a life-threatening disease. In the meantime, however, Thomasina has been rescued—by the mysterious Lori, the Red Witch of the glen. Thomasina is now Tabitha, the descendant of an Egyptian goddess, and she is coming back to seek revenge! Thomasina, like Jenny of The Abandoned, Gallico’s other great feline heroine (Jenny is Thomasina’s great-aunt), tells her own story in her own way, witty, charming, divine, and sometimes as sharp as an unsheathed claw. Thomasina is a cat for the ages. Thomasina is a sheer delight.

Now in paperbackOnce upon a time, in a gloomy castle on a lonely hill, where there were thirteen clocks that wouldn’t go, there lived a cold, aggressive Duke, and his niece, the Princess Saralinda. She was warm in every wind and weather, but he was always cold. His hands were as cold as his smile and almost as cold as his heart. He wore gloves when he was asleep, and he wore gloves when he was awake, which made it difficult for him to pick up pins or coins or the kernels of nuts, or to tear the wings from nightingales. So begins James Thurber's sublimely revamped fairy tale, The 13 Clocks, in which a wicked Duke who imagines he has killed time, and the Duke’s beautiful niece, for whom time seems to have run out, both meet their match, courtesy of an enterprising and very handsome prince in disguise. Readers young and old will take pleasure in this tale of love forestalled but ultimately fulfilled, admiring its upstanding hero (“who yearned to find in a far land the maiden of his dreams, singing as he went…and possibly slaying a dragon here and there”) and unapologetic villain (“We all have flaws,” the Duke said. “Mine is being wicked”), while wondering at the enigmatic Golux, the mysterious stranger whose unpredictable interventions speed the story to its necessarily happy end.

London hasn’t been kind to Peter, a lonely boy whose parents are always out at parties, and though Peter would love to have a cat for company, his nanny won’t hear of it. One day, as Peter is walking out the door, he sees a truck bearing down on a tabby. Dashing out to save the cat, he is struck by the oncoming truck himself. Everything is different when Peter comes to: He has fur, whiskers, and claws; he has become a cat himself! But London isn’t any kinder to cats than it is to children. Jennie, a savvy stray who takes charge of Peter, knows that all too well. Jennie schools young Peter in the ways of cats, including how to sniff out a nice napping spot, the proper way to dine on mouse, and the single most important tactic a cat can learn: “When in doubt, wash.” Jennie and Peter will face many challenges—and not all of them are from the dangerous outside world—in their struggle to find a place that is truly home.

A New York Times Best Illustrated Children's Book of the Year. In Arm in Arm, Remy Charlip, the great children’s book author and illustrator, is at his most playful, his zaniest, funniest, and cleverest. He rewrites the rules of riddles, tongue twisters, puns, and performance-based play, or rather, throws all rules out the window. Some pages require turning the book completely around, 360 degrees. A magnifying glass may also be useful. It is a book for kids of all ages.

Peewee’s in the box! Peewee the dog doesn’t know any tricks, “not a single one not even how to roll over not even how to shake hands but never mind he is so teeny weeny that everybody loves him,” the clown, the fat lady, the thin man, the huge tall giant, the strong baby, the acrobats, the elephants, and all the other amazing performers in the wonderful circus of the man with the quite tall red hat. But then something unexpected happens that threatens to bring Peewee’s time under the Big Top to an end.Now Open the Box is a beautiful example of the art of Dorothy Kunhardt, the author of the timeless classic Pat the Bunny and the pioneering picture book Junket Is Nice. Here Kunhardt speaks with wonderfully reassuring directness to children’s hopes and fears while making magic out of the simplest things.

One spring day, the little Water Sprite is born in a house of reeds at the bottom of a mill pond. Duckweed soup, pickled water fleas, and other dainties are served to celebrate. The little Water Sprite grows up quickly, and soon he is bored of gazing out the window at the newts and fish swimming by. There is a whole new world to see outside his living room, and the little Water Sprite is determined to explore it! In the pond he makes friends with Cyprian the carp and encounters the fearsome nine-eyed lamprey, but his most thrilling adventures await him on dry land.

Back in print in the U.S. for the first time in over 30 years.Rosemary's plan to clean houses during her summer break and surprise her mother with the money hits a snag when an old lady at the market talks her into buying a second-rate broom and a cat she can't even afford to keep. But appearances can be deceiving. Some old ladies are witches, some brooms can fly, and some ordinary-looking cats are Princes of the Royal Blood. Rosemary's cat ("You may call me Carbonel. That is my name.") soon enlists her help in an adventure to free him from a hideous spell and return him to his rightful throne. But along the way Rosemary and her friend John must do some clever sleuthing, work a little magic of their own, and—not least— put up with the demands of a very haughty cat.