The Children’s Book Review
Published: September 13, 2013
Claudia Mills is the author of many chapter and middle-grade books, including 7 x 9=Trouble!; How Oliver Olson Changed the World; Kelsey Green, Reading Queen; and, most recently, Zero Tolerance. She also teaches philosophy at the University of Colorado at Boulder. She lives in Boulder, Colorado. To learn more, visit her website: claudiamillsauthor.com
Mills shares a wonderful list of her family’s favorite books that feature girl protagonists—she encourages you to share them with both boys and girls, alike.
Then I became the mother of boys: Christopher, now about to turn 25, and Gregory, now about to turn 21.
I held my newborn son in my arms and gazed sadly at the bookshelves lining the living room, stuffed full of stories about girls so dear to my heart, stories I so wanted to share with this new little person who had come into my life, who happened to be a boy. Perhaps I should have taken his birth as an opportunity to branch out and discover the classics of boyhood. I didn’t. Instead, I spent the next fifteen years reading all those girl books to my boys, one after the other, some of them over and over and over again.
My older son is now about to become a father. I don’t know the gender of my grandchild yet. Part of me hopes it will be a girl: I can share all my Betsy-Tacy books with her! But now I know that if it’s a boy, I can share my Betsy-Tacy books with him, too. Who knows? He may come to love them as much as I do and share them with his own daughter—or son—someday.
Betsy, Tacy, and Tib
The Betsy-Tacy series is based on the author’s own childhood experiences growing up in Mankato, Minnesota, at the turn of the last century. The books are suffused with the warmth of Betsy’s loving family and her enduring friendship with her best chums, Tacy and Tib. My personal favorite in the series is Betsy and Tacy Go Downtown, where we see Betsy coming into her own as a writer. But the (innocently) naughty exploits in Betsy, Tacy, and Tib (the wonderful haircutting scene!) give this one wide appeal.
Ages 8 and up | Publisher: HarperCollins; Reissue edition | April 5, 2000
The Witch Family
A book my boys and I read together every Halloween. Amy and her friend Clarissa “banquish” Old Witch to a glass hill for her past episodes of wickedness, but then take pity on her loneliness and send her Little Witch Girl and Weenie Witchie to create the full witch family. Everything that happens on the glass hill is made up by Amy and Clarissa, yet seems so real that the book works both as a whimsical Halloween story and as a tribute to the power of children’s imagination.
Ages 8 and up | Publisher: HMH Books for Young Readers | September 1, 2000
Pinky Pye
Another Estes classic. When the Pye family of Estes’s Newbery-winning Ginger Pye spends the summer on Fire Island, they adopt an abandoned kitten, Pinky Pye, who “writes” her own narrative of the summer’s adventures. So here again, Estes blurs the lines between reality and imagination. I think I have Pinky Pye to blame, or thank, for the fact that when our boys decided to start begging for their first (and only) pet, we ended up with a cat.
Ages 8 and up | Publisher: HMH Books for Young Readers | September 1, 2000
Little Town on the Prairie
We loved the whole series and made a family pilgrimage to De Smet, South Dakota, the original “little town on the prairie,” once Christopher got his driver’s license and wanted a family road trip. In this volume, the deliciously awful Nellie Oleson of On the Banks of Plum Creek reappears, and Laura gets sent home from school for challenging the authority of her teacher, Miss Wilder, who is deliciously awful in her own right.
Ages 8 and up | Publisher: HarperCollins; Reissue edition | April 8, 2008
The Pink Motel
In this lesser-known book by the author of Caddie Woodlawn, the Mellen family inherits a “most peculiar” motel painted a “most unusual” bright pink, which attracts a bizarre assortment of guests, including Sandra Brown, who cares only for getting a perfectly even tan, eccentric artist Miss Ferry with a magical snack-generating hamper, Miss DeGree with her pedigreed poodles, and two mysterious gentlemen who might very well be gangsters. . . .
Ages 8 and up | Publisher: Aladdin; Reissue edition | April 1, 1993
Add these books to your collection: 7 x 9=Trouble!; How Oliver Olson Changed the World; Kelsey Green, Reading Queen; and Zero Tolerance
Zero Tolerance, Available Now!
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