Click here for some authors we’ve talked to about their books and their process.

And click below for some recommendations from some authors we trust.

 

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Elizabeth Patridge

Elizabeth Partridge is the author of over a dozen books for children and adults, among them the highly celebrated Marching to Freedom: Walk Together, Children, and Don’t You Grow Weary, as well as biographies of Dorothea Lange, Woody Guthrie, and John Lennon. Her books have received many honors, including National Book Award Finalist, Boston Globe-Horn Book Award, Los Angeles Times Book Prize, Michael L. Printz Honor, SCBWI Golden Kite Award, SLJ’s Battle of the Books, and the Jane Addams Children’s Book Award.

Her story, “Mojo, Moonshine, and the Blues,” appeared in the fifth volume of the Guys Read library: True Stories.

Elizabeth is on the core faculty at the Vermont College of Fine Arts, MFA in Writing for Children & Young Adults.

The following is a list of books she’s either loved reading with her two boys, or that she just thinks are fantastic.

 

  • Robot Dreams
  • Sara Varon

  • I love this wordless graphic novel. A dog builds a robot and they become friends, but the robot rusts and can’t move after he goes in the water at the beach. Both funny and sad.

  • American Born Chinese
  • Gene Luen Yang

  • The Monkey King, a Chinese folk hero, messes with the main character who is trying to fit in at his all-white school. Graphic novel.

  • The Graveyard Book
  • Neil Gaiman

  • How can you resist a book with these first two lines: “The knife had a handle of polished black bone, and a blade sharper and finer than any razor. If it sliced you, you might not even know you’d been cut, not immediately.”

  • One-Eyed Cat
  • Paula Fox

  • What if you found a gun and were told never to shoot it, and one evening you shot at a flickering shadow, and you thought you might have hit a cat, right in the eye? How would you deal with the cat, and your guilt, fear, and shame?

  • Robin Hood

  • Get the biggest, fattest version of this book you can find from the library. It should come in at 150-200+ pages. Total adventure and high jinx.

  • Danny, the Champion of the World
  • Roald Dahl

  • Danny and his father feed rum-soaked raisins to the pheasants on the estate where they are never allowed to go hunting. They set out to poach a record number of pheasants from the dreaded estate owner. Dahl is the guy who wrote Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, and Fantastic Mister Fox.

  • The Port Chicago 50: Disaster, Mutiny, and the Fight for Civil Rights
  • Steve Sheinkin

  • Why were 50 sailors, all African American, tried for mutiny by the US Navy during WWII when they refused to go back to work after an explosion killed 300?

  • Kinda Like Brothers
  • Coe Booth

  • Jarrett’s mother takes in two foster kids: one a baby, one a boy a year older than Jarrett. As it says on the back cover: “Kinda like enemies. Kinda like friends. Kinda like brothers.”

  • Revolution, (The Sixties Trilogy #2)
  • Deborah Wiles

  • This book is a hybrid. It’s a novel that takes place during Freedom Summer in 1963, and yet it is full of photographs and real quotes. Mesmerizing.

  • Eleanor and Park
  • Rainbow Rowell

  • Two smart, funny, quirky misfits find each other. This book has one of the most tender love scenes ever, so go get a copy right away.

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Eliot Schrefer is a primate who writes novels about apes.

Eliot Schrefer

  • Homeland
  • R.A. Salvatore

  • "The first fifty pages of the Dark Elf Trilogy have enough swordplay and plot twists to make you gasp."

  • The Tin Woodman of Oz
  • L. Frank Baum

  • "All the Oz books, actually. But I liked the Tin Woodsman the most, so this is the book I'm listing. Let's not psychoanalyze."

  • The Belgariad
  • David Eddings

  • Also, The Mallorean. "When I was the new kid in school, the characters in these books were my buds. Funny, courageous, and there's 1000 pages worth of them."

  • The Princess Bride
  • William Goldman

  • "Funny and clever and full of heart."

  • Dragonlance: Chronicles and Legends

  • by Margaret Weiss and Tracy Hickman. "I started with the computer game and then turned to the books. Lots of gods and glowy magic and giant spiders rearing in pain! Awesome."

Peter Brown

is an illustrator and a writer.  Probably best know for his books about a dog named Chowder.  But he’s working on plenty of new books right now.

  • I can't overemphasize how perfectly James Marshall balances sweetness and absurdity in these stories.

  • Everyone Poops

  • Everyone Poops is a continuous source of 'inspiration.

  • James and the Giant Peach

  • Witty dialogue, fantastical adventure and a wonderfully dark sense of humor seem to effortlessly flow from Roald Dahl's pen.

  • This series is perhaps the most unique, thoughtful, and provocative fantasy I’ve ever read.

  • 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea

  • I was mesmerized by the way Verne describes the science and logic of the world in which this story takes place.

David Yoo

  • The Last Picture Show
  • Although it takes place in a tiny, dusty Texas town that's nothing like the New England town I grew up in, this is easily my favorite coming-of-age story, ever, period.
  • Then Again, Maybe I Won’t
  • Given the fact that I asked for a pair of binoculars for Christmas (for "bird watching"), too, this was the teen novel that spoke to me when I was 13.
  • The Postman Always Rings Twice
  • My favorite noir writer, this is one of the best plotted stories, ever, in my opinion, with one of the most satisfying endings to a story to boot.
  • Rats Saw God

  • This was the first recent(ish) YA novel that got me excited to write about teens, because it made me think I was reading about, well . . . me.

  • Rosemary’s Baby
  • This horror story is just about perfect in every way, and I've read it maybe 50 times in my lifetime. The movie's one of my favorites, too.
  • Franny and Zooey
  • A decidedly strange little novel that for the life of me I can't quite describe why it's one of my favorites, but it just is.

Mo Willems