Summer reissue: Writer and reader Rachael King revisits more childhood reads that satisfy just as much now as they did then. (Read part one here.)

First published on September 24, 2023.

“No book is really worth reading at 10,” wrote C.S. Lewis in his essay On Stories, “which is not equally – and often far more – worth reading at the age of 50 and beyond.” 

Did I expect, as a 10- (and 11-, and 12-) year-old, to be returning, in the distant, unknowable, unimaginable future, to the books I was reading at the time? When I would be old? Fifty even?

Perhaps. Some of the books I read as a child I knew would be with me always. Children’s author Katherine Rundell said recently on the excellent Island of Brilliant podcast: “Kids are the best readers… they take the stories and they go into their blood and into their bones and cartilage, and they walk around with those stories until they die… With adult readers you’re talking to them across the table; with a child reader you are cheek-to-cheek and whispering in their ear.”

Recently I wrote about six children’s books and authors that are worth returning to as an adult reader. It was painful to try and limit myself to six, because there are many more books out there, walking around with me, inside my cartilage and bones – and probably yours, dear reader – that are worth excavating. So, with that in mind, here are four more books or authors from your childhood* that still offer as much if not more satisfaction in your adult years.

Penelope Lively

Penelope Lively is the only writer to have won both the Carnegie Medal (for children’s literature) and the Booker Prize. It’s obvious from her very first novel Astercote (1970) that here is a writer who respects her readers and who cares about language and ideas. Astercote is not as well-known as her award-winner The Ghost of Thomas Kempe (which I haven’t yet read) and A Stich in Time, both of which are still in print, but it’s well worth tracking down. In it, you can feel a writer of immense talent just dipping her toe into what makes a good story: atmosphere and intrigue. With shades of ancient plagues and self-isolating communities, Astercote takes on a new discomfort when read in the wake of the world’s Covid response.

Like Astercote, The Wild Hunt of Hagworthy (1971) taps into the uncanny: the disturbing stories that are embedded in the land, thrumming just under the feet or in the corner of the eye; stories that seemed to be quite prevalent in popular culture in the early 70s, when pagan worship and folk horror crept into children’s books and TV as well. There’s a real sense of menace and danger here from teenage boys in the thrall of an ancient force, unwittingly unleashed by a well-meaning vicar. 

I preferred these two to the later A Stitch in Time (1976), a time-slip story set in Lyme Regis, where the cliffs are pregnant with dinosaur fossils and ammonites litter the beach. It’s a more sedate book, with gentle humour and a quirky only child in a stilted family unit who talks to inanimate objects (which talk back) and who discovers the messy freedom and joy of the large family staying in the hotel next door. In The Wild Hunt, the landscape more heavily reflects the mood of its young protagonist. In A Stitch in Time, it’s more sweet; the ideas, while more developed – involving clocks and time, and slips and stitches both literal and figurative –  are also spelled out more for the young reader. The other two feel rawer and more visceral, and therefore more interesting.

A Wrinkle in Time by Madeline L’Engle

“You have to write the book that wants to be written,” said Madeline L’Engle. “And if the book will be too difficult for grown-ups, then you write it for children.” 

First of all, I love that A Wrinkle in Time has the audacity to open with the line, “It was a dark and stormy night.” I don’t remember if I read this book as a child – if I didn’t, I can’t think how I missed it. It has a rich, dream-like quality with hard science at its core, as well as speculation about other worlds and the entities that might occupy them. It was the book I thought of most when reading Pip Adam’s astonishing new novel Audition, and the idea that the physical state of a world can be beyond human comprehension and language. 

It was actually a newer book that drove me to read A Wrinkle in Time – Rebecca Stead’s 2009 middle-grade novel When You Reach Me, which is one of the best contemporary children’s novels I’ve read. In it, the protagonist Miranda adores L’Engle’s book; it becomes a talisman in her story, and ties into its timey-wimey twists. It is a joy to read novels that converse with other novels, and which subtly enhance the reading of both.  

Reading A Wrinkle in Time with my autistic child, I couldn’t help but read Meg and little brother Charles Wallace as neurodivergent in different ways. It’s definitely worth a trip back to see the Mrs Whatsit, Who and Which, and the nurturing Miss Beast, who compels Meg to think to herself, “It was she who was limited by her senses, not the blind beasts, for they must have senses of which she could not even dream.”

The Whale Rider by Witi Ihimaera 

I confess I did not read this novel as a child. I was 17 when it came out in 1987; the same year I was gripped by Tess of the D’Urbervilles and The Bone People, which took me three attempts to start before I was carried away. I wish I had read The Whale Rider – I would have loved it. As a Pākehā child, I was privileged to have spent some time in te ao Māori, thanks to my father. By the time I was 11, I had been on marae, attended a tangi in Kawhia, and slept in the wharenui at Pākirikiri marae in Tokomaru Bay (not far from Whangara where the novel is set). It was a part of New Zealand life I was comfortable with and always wanted to return to. 

That year, 1987, the Te Māori exhibition arrived from Europe, and on a class trip we were escorted by a kapa haka teacher and welcomed into the space at Auckland Art Gallery and given a guided tour. Afterwards, I wrote in my English journal how moving the experience had been for me and I think it was as much for the connection I felt with those early experiences travelling the country with my dad as for the stories we were told of the exhibits. 

What a gap in my reading that was. Reading The Whale Rider recently, I was surprised to find the book is narrated not by the young girl, Kahu, but by her uncle. Brimming with life and pūrākau, it is evocative, lyrical, moving, and laugh-out-loud funny, thanks to the hard-case Nanny Flowers. I shouldn’t be surprised by these things of course. Witi Ihimaera knew what he was doing. This is not a children’s book, really; it’s an everybody book, and how mind and heart-opening it must have been for non-Māori children at the time, and how affirming for Māori children.

Diana Wynne Jones

The only Diana Wynne Jones book I remember reading as a child, and which I returned to with great satisfaction when I found a reissued copy about 15 years ago, was Dogsbody, in which Sirius the dog star is banished to earth as punishment for some transgression in the starry realm. Reborn into the body of a puppy, he is rescued from drowning and taken home by a girl whose father is in prison for his connections to the IRA. She’s treated badly by her dysfunctional relations, and the neighbourhood kids, because she is Irish. 

Jones writes families so well, with varying degrees of affection and neglect, and with similar quirks and spikes to Margaret Mahy’s families. The Time of the Ghost, with its cryptic point of view and its rowdy set of sisters living in a boys’ boarding school with awful parents, is said to be Jones’ most autobiographical novel. DWJ is harsh on the way the girls look and act – no generic pretty girls here. They’re awkward in their skin and in their heads. One girl is clearly depressed (“grieving”) and is taunted for it. Another is frumpy with an eccentric dress sense. 

The idyllic, pastoral countryside is alive with menace; the girls mock-worship a ragdoll named Monigan, with blood harvested from the dripping noses of schoolboys (“[I] wonder if Monigan wasn’t really a manifestation of our common thirst for excitement, or our suicidal urges, or something”) – all adding up to a complex supernatural mystery verging on folk horror. 

As an adult, I’m attracted to the DWJ books that ground their magic firmly in the “real” world, where the magic encroaches in often sinister ways. That means no Howl’s Moving Castle, and no Chrestomancy books, as widely adored by both children and adults as they are: I’ve gone for the standalone novels aimed at slightly older readers, the ones that Emily Tesh, in her excellent essay on The Time of the Ghost refers to as her “Holy Shit, Diana!” period (1981-1986). 

I came to Fire and Hemlock, another complex puzzle, by way of  an excellent Backlisted episode. It’s loosely based on the ballad of Tam Lin, but also, less obviously, TS Eliot’s The Four Quartets, with shades of Cupid and Psyche. It’s odd and beautiful, unlike anything I’ve read, with one of the greatest protagonists in Polly, who ages from ten to about nineteen in the book. I’m not even sure I quite understand it, and there’s a slightly disturbing relationship at its heart, but the wrongness of it doesn’t diminish the reading experience.

I saw something on social media recently that said you wouldn’t listen to a song or a concerto only once. You have to hear it again and again to pick up its layers, its nuances – so why not the same with books?

When an author writes complex novels like these for young people, it’s for the satisfaction of art well-made – they certainly don’t do it as a gimmick to shift units. As Katherine Rundell said on the Island of Brilliant episode, when she revealed that her new book Impossible Creatures is based on an aborted, blasphemous poem by John Donne: “I don’t tell children this and I don’t plan to… I don’t think it’s a selling point.” 

That writers like Rundell and Diana Wynne Jones and others see no reason not to layer their stories like this is an astonishing gift to children (“cheek-to-cheek, whispering in their ear”) and to those of us who come back to them again in adulthood and discover something new. 

* More recent children’s books to give a go or to pass to your own kids to be absorbed into their marrow include: Tyger by SF Said; The Raven’s Song by Zana Fraillon and Bren MacDibble; October, October by Katya Balen; and Bone Music by David Almond. Future classics, all.

Some of the above books can be purchased (and others ordered) from Unity Books Wellington and Auckland

Summer reissue: Writer and reader Rachael King surveys the childhood reads that satisfy her as much now as they did then.

First published on March 2, 2023.

Do you read children’s books, even if you don’t have children of your own? “Of course not”, I hear you say, “I’m a grown-up. I have left behind childish things”. But go on, secretly, you really want to, don’t you. Because what is a children’s book but a map of the world, a life-altering experience distilled into a perfect package: a galloping story that leaves your hair swept back and your heart beating faster, or a gentle cajoling breeze that takes your hand and shows you magic hiding just out of sight? And don’t we all need a bit of magic right now? 

W. H. Auden declared that if a children’s book isn’t good for adults as well, it just isn’t a good book. More recently, S. F. Said, author of the wonderful new Blakean fantasy Tyger, said on Twitter, “We call them children’s books, but really, they’re written for an audience that includes children, but excludes no-one. Children’s books are books for everyone.” 

If that doesn’t convince you, stop what you are doing and go and read Katherine Rundell’s sparkling ode, Why You Should Read Children’s Books Even Though You Are So Old and Wise. It puts into words everything I’m thinking as I merrily strain my eyes over my old, jaundiced Puffin editions. 

Going back to your childhood reading offers not only comfort but intellectual joy – you will pick up on things that you didn’t as a child, because good books are multi-layered and offer a different experience for every reader, no matter what their stage of life. When Katherine Rundell writes for children, it is to satisfy both her child self (“autonomy, peril, justice, food and… a density of atmosphere”) and her adult self (“acknowledgements of fear, love, failure; of the rat that lives within the human heart”).

I grew up in the 1970s and 80s, a rich, if not diverse, time for books. The books that were available to New Zealand children then were almost all written by white New Zealand, Australian, British and American authors, with occasional Scandinavians like Tove Jansson and Astrid Lindgren thrown in. Some of the books I read had Māori or Asian characters, but they were usually, apart from a few stories in the School Journal, written by Pākehā authors. So honestly revisiting my childhood books means a return to a landscape as snowy white as Narnia under the reign of the White Witch. Thankfully, today’s young people have a much wider choice of authors and stories, and much more chance of finding themselves in a book.  

So with that in mind, and after trying and discarding some along the way, including Nancy Drew (read this for the best commentary ever), The Famous Five (boring!), Barbara Sleigh and Edward Eager (both of whom I adored but their sweetness and whimsy didn’t tickle my adult sensibilities), here are six books or series that reward returning to, or, if you didn’t encounter them in childhood, reading as an adult.

C.S. Lewis’s Narnia series

Children’s books are the ultimate in comfort reading, especially if you can remember what you were doing when you first read them. I picture my dad reading The Horse and his Boy aloud to me in my bunk when I was six, when he was living alone in a damp fibrolite bach after he and my mother separated. We had to abandon the book after I vomited all over it after too much fairy bread at a party, but he gave me the Narnia set for my next birthday, so I could read them myself. I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve read them. Yes, they had hidden Christian allegory and xenophobia that I was blind to, and Lewis did wrong by Susan in The Last Battle, but reading Narnia books will forever be tied to my memories of my late dad and other key flashbulb memories. If I had to choose a favourite it might be The Silver Chair: of all the Narnia children, I identified most with bullied Jill Pole, and mopey Marsh-wiggle Puddleglum, and it gave me complicated feelings about handsome, black-clad prince Rillian, my first literary crush. 

The Owl Service by Alan Garner

I thought I had read The Owl Service as a child but when I picked it up last year, nothing about it was familiar to me. I found the book, which explores class and fate, mind-altering. To compound its strangeness, I watched the 1969 television adaptation straight after – and though the dialogue is almost word for word the same as the book, the children, who I had imagined to be about 14, are played by actors in their 20s, which heightens the psycho-sexual aspects of the book that might elude a child reader (or they might just feel something but not know what that is). The three teenagers play out an ancient love triangle that is doomed to be repeated in the small Welsh hamlet, seemingly forever. The ending is chaotic and mystical, abrupt and unexpected, as the perceived hero of the book lets the side down (she wanted flowers, not owls, you fool!). A couple of years earlier I read the more conventional The Weirdstone of Brisingamen, which people look back on with moon-eyed nostalgia, but it was, frankly, disappointing and boring. I feel like a philistine for saying it, but I feel reassured that even Alan Garner called it “a fairly bad book”. So skip the Weirdstone and go for The Owl Service I reckon. Then watch the freaky TV adaptation. 

Charlotte Sometimes by Penelope Farmer

A classic timeslip novel which sees a 1950s boarding school pupil waking up in the same bed, but in the body of Clare, from 1918, while World War One still rages. I remembered the premise but hadn’t appreciated the beauty of the writing and how Farmer uses landscape to convey the melancholy tone, and the poignancy of the effects of war on the community. I was possibly one of the few people to come to The Cure via Penelope Farmer rather than the other way around. Robert Smith blatantly lifted the lyrics and title for his song Charlotte Sometimes directly from the book (The tears were pouring down her face / She was crying and crying for a girl / Who died so many years before…) The music video shows a sexy soft-focus schoolgirl (Charlotte is 13 in the book), haunted inexplicably by a Victorian version of herself. Farmer wrote honestly and humbly about her experience of being ripped off by, forgiving, and meeting Smith, in that order. She speaks of how she was struggling financially while the band was getting rich but conceded that the song gave the book another life, including sales it might not otherwise have had. 

Playing Beatie Bow by Ruth Park

Set in Sydney, this 1980 novel is another timeslip story. Abigail, furious at her family situation, follows a mysterious girl – Beatie Bow – back into 1873. The Rocks of the nineteenth century come alive in vivid, cacophonous detail, as does the Bow family and their Orkney dialect. I remember reading and loving the book at 11 or 12, but as an adult was surprised by dense, lyrical descriptions and the menace that Abigail faces. At one point she is abducted and narrowly misses being sold for her virginity – I’m not sure how much I would have understood at that age, so it was worth coming back for a second read. There’s also the blossoming of first love, and a candid account of all the kinds of kisses Abigail has endured up until that point (“hot muffin” and “hairy sardine”) alongside intricate details of the types of ships that sailed in Sydney Harbour at the time. It must have been educational in more ways than one, but the thrill of the story hasn’t dimmed in 40 years, and it’s easy to see why it’s an enduring classic of Australian children’s literature (even though Park was born a New Zealander).

Under the Mountain by Maurice Gee

Under the Mountain is a foundational text in the King family. In 1980, my brother Jonathan and I lived in Auckland, side-eying volcanoes, and we auditioned (unsuccessfully) for the parts of Rachel and Theo in the iconic TV series. My brother went on to direct the 2009 film version. Gee, according to his biography by Rachel Barrowman, wanted to write for his own children, but also he’d heard that “children’s book as a rule sold better than adult ones”, so he turned to, of all books, The Weirdstone of Brisingamen for inspiration. It really holds up to an adult reading. Gee’s language is typically elegant and never dumbed down for its audience, and because he thought victory was often scored too easily by child heroes, he kills off cousin Ricky at the end, “floating face down in a sea as black as oil.” And then Lake Pupuke erupts causing death and destruction… it is dark. He may have regretted frightening the bejeesus out of a generation.

The Dark is Rising sequence by Susan Cooper

These books meant way more to me than I can fit into a couple of hundred words. When I discovered them aged 12, in exile from my family, boarding with friends in Hastings and feeling desperately melancholy, they shaped my worldview, made me yearn to visit Cornwall and Wales and to feel the pulsing of the Dark, the Light, and the Wild Magic beneath my feet wherever I stood. So naturally I read the series every decade and they never lose their shine. Susan Cooper is having a bit of a renaissance of late, thanks to Robert Macfarlane and his annual #TheDarkisReading hashtag, and the incredible BBC audio adaptation he wrote, which was broadcast this past Christmas.

Many people have read The Dark is Rising, but reading the whole series back-to-back is an immersive, wonderous experience. While the first, Over Sea,Under Stone, has been described as “Five Go to Cornwall” in its tone, the series gathers gravitas as it goes. The Grey King is Cooper at the height of her writing power. I find the magic never leaves me; I just need to pump it up every now and again. 

In the wonderful Backlisted podcast episode on The Dark is Rising, Macfarlane as guest says: “We’re all in exile from our childhoods, looking back at a threshold we can’t cross.” As a child, I very much yearned for the future and what it might bring. While reading these books can’t and shouldn’t put you back over the threshold, I reckon travelling back in time with all the knowledge and experience you have now, meeting your forward-looking self and striking up a conversation, might be just thing you need right now. 

But Katherine Rundell says it better: “Plunge yourself soul-forward into a children’s book: see if you do not find in them an unexpected alchemy; if they will not un-dig in you something half hidden and half forgotten.”

More children’s books that are still great reads now you’re a grown-up