rachelmanija suggested a list of Forgotten Newbery Books that Are Really Worth Reading, so I’ve compiled my top ten, listed here in order of year of publication. For obvious reasons, this list skews toward the older books, and I tried to pick ones that I felt have been really forgotten, although it turns out that it can be a bit hard to tell if a book has been truly forgotten or if I, personally, just hadn’t happened to heard of it before this project.


1. Marjorie Hill Allee's Jane’s Island, 1932. Come for an engaging story that also meditates on women’s place in the sciences and society, stay for lovely description of life around the Wood’s Hole research station, and also for the cranky German scientist who is VERY shell-shocked from World War I and FIRMLY intends to prove that nature is red in tooth and claw.

2. Dorothy P. Lathrop’s The Fairy Circus, 1932. FAIRIES put on a CIRCUS with the aid of WOODLAND CREATURES. What more could you want from a book!

3. Erick Berry’s Winged Girl of Knossos, 1934. Have you always wanted a retelling of the tale of Theseus and the minotaur crossed with Daedalus and Icarus with a genderswapped Icarus who is a tomboy in the tomboy-welcoming culture of ancient Crete? Yes you have.

4. Christine Weston’s Bhimsa, The Dancing Bear, 1946. Two boys (one English and one Indian) go adventuring across India in the company of their friend Bhimsa, the dancing bear. A fun adventure story.

5. Cyrus Fisher’s The Avion My Uncle Flew, 1947. An adventure story set in post-World War II France, featuring a glider and some secret Nazis in the mountains and the most impressive literary trick I’ve seen in a Newbery book, or indeed in pretty much any book ever. (I talk about it at more length in the review but don’t want to spoil it here.)

6. Claire Huchet Bishop's Pancakes-Paris, 1948. In post-war Paris, a young boy gets a box of pancake mix from some American soldiers, and makes pancakes for his mother and sister for Mardi Gras. That’s it! That’s the story.

7. Louise Rankin's Daughter of the Mountains, 1949. When a young Tibetan girl’s beloved dog is stolen, she chases him all the way across Tibet and into India to get him back. Super fun adventure story. No one is the least bit fazed at the idea of a girl having an adventure.

8. Jennie Lindquist's The Golden Name Day, 1956. Nancy spends a year with her Swedish-American relatives and they get up to all sorts of lovely escapades. Beautiful illustrations by Garth Williams, who you may be familiar with from the Little House series. There should be more books which are just about characters having a fantastic time.

9. Mari Sandoz's The Horsecatcher, 1957. A Cheyenne boy wants to become a horsecatcher rather than a warrior. I’m not planning a companion post to the Problem of Tomboys about Boys Who Don’t Want to Do Classic Boy Things, but if I were, this book would be on it. Fascinating evocation of our hero’s world.

10. Cynthia Rylant's A Fine White Dust, 1987. Kind of an outlier on this list, which is mostly adventure stories and people having good times stories. This one is a realistic fiction story about a boy growing up in the South who falls in love with a traveling preacher. VERY intense. EXTREMELY gay. Never admits to being gay but nonetheless one of the gayest books I’ve ever read. Very short. I read most of it in one lunch break and spent that entire lunch break internally keening because it is VERY STRESSFUL but in a good way.