But the first book I ever read by Lois Lowry was Taking Care of Terrific, first published in 1983, and of her many books, it is still my favorite. I still have the tattered copy I bought in elementary school. The pages are yellow and brittle and worn. (That’s a picture of it.) I’ve read this book at least once a year my whole life. And here’s why.

This book tells the story of Enid, who wants to change her life, and how she does it.

Enid is 14 and takes a job for the summer babysitting a four-year-old boy named Joshua Warwick Cameron IV, which seems like an ordinary thing to do, but she definitely sets her sights on a more-than-ordinary summer.

I decided that I would spend the summer meeting new people and maybe becoming something of a new person myself. I decided that my life was going to have elements of romance, intrigue, danger, and pathos in it.

And she decides to do it in the Public Garden, saying this:

If that sounds foolish to you, it only means that you don’t know Boston.

Well, I didn’t know Boston, but after that introduction, I sure wanted to. Chapter One sets the stage: Enid is looking back on her summer, thinking about the new friends she made, and she is in big trouble, but we don’t know why. By page three, though, we know that something amazing happened, if only for an hour:

… on that night we were all together, and a thin slice of moon was shining; there was music playing, and the green was all around us so green that you could feel it down inside your soul, and everybody’s life was changed. At least for one hour. Maybe that is all you ever get in this world, one hour like that.

I am fairly certain that when I first read this book at the age of eight, I’d probably never had an hour like that, but I’ve had plenty since, and they are some of my favorite memories. I think that when I first read that passage, I might have held my breath a little, wondering what had happened, wanting an hour like that.

Reading on, we learn that Enid is one of those painfully aware girls — aware of herself, aware of the details of the world around her. Enid is the sort of person who reads books and between the lines, and I’ve always liked that about her.

Enid hates her name. This is the book that taught me about all of those adjectives that end in “d” …

Maybe you have never noticed, but the most hideous adjectives end in the letter d. Pick up any one of Stephen King’s horror novels and open to any page; you’ll find them: horrid, putrid, sordid, acrid, viscid, squalid. And the very worst: fetid. Probably you don’t even know what “fetid” means; it isn’t a word you hear people use very often. But if you read a lot, the way I do, especially horror books, you come across that word, usually describing the breath of creatures who have returned from the grave and are covered with green slime. They all have fetid breath. Enid isn’t a repulsive adjective, as far as I know. But it sounds as if it should be … You can see why I decided to change my name.

Enid and Joshua Warwick Cameron IV ~ who decide to change their names to Cynthia and Tom Terrific, in the effort to become and feel like all new people ~ end up hanging around the Public Garden that summer with a saxophone player named Hawk, some bag ladies, and Seth Sandroff, a boy Enid knows from school and thinks she loathes. Of course, they end up having all sorts of unexpected adventures, big and small.

Part of what makes this book so wonderful is that Lois Lowry, as usual, treats her readers like they’re smart. There are references and ideas in this book that might have been a little bit too big for me at the time, but I hung in there because I knew that Lois Lowry knew I could. Not that this book is hard to understand or anything like that, but there is a humor and sophistication to it that must have taken me beyond where my mind was circa the third grade. Enid says she isn’t sure what transvestites are, and neither was I. This is the book where I first heard of Gregory Peck and Portrait of a Lady and Moby Dick, and this is the book that made me want to read Jane Eyre, because the housekeeper is reading it, and Enid tells her to just wait and see what Mr. Rochester is hiding in the attic.

Another thing I love about Lois Lowry: She tends to treat little kids — little boy kids, particularly — less as nuisances than the little charming bundles of smarts and cuteness they often are. Like Sam Krupnik, brother of Anastasia, and Joshua Warwick Camera IV. Sam and Joshua are very different characters, definitely, but they are characters, not caricatures. They are not depicted one dimensionally as pests or brats: they’re just little people. I think I fell in love with this book right around the time my own little brother was born, and I think I subconsciously appreciated that Anastasia and Enid were allowed to love these little boys — why wouldn’t they? These little boys were awesome! That’s how I felt about my little brother, too, and so I felt like I was a part of the Anastasia and Enid club, the best club on Earth, as far as I was concerned.

Like all my favorite books from childhood, this book had a big impact on me that has lasted for decades. I think in those years when I was first starting to become real friends with the boys in my neighborhood and on my school bus and in my class, I really absorbed the idea that boys who seemed utterly grody like Seth Sandroff might be secretly fantastic in their own secret Seth Sandroff-y kind of way. And whenever I accomplish some sort of goal, even now, I think about how Enid thought about how fun it was to win a battle and how fun it might be to start another one. I never hear Stardust without thinking of Hawk and his long legs, remembering how this book was the first time I ever heard of that song and learned that it’s special, and the way Hawk would say, “Long as she doan rain.”

When I would take a job babysitting some truly magnificent child, I would think, like Enid thought of Tom Terrific, “It sure doesn’t take long to start to love a kid.” The best kid I ever babysat was named Thomas, and I thought of him as my Tom Terrific.

This book is the reason I went to the Public Gardens when I was in Boston at the age of 31 and sat on a bench and watched the swan boats glide across the lake. It’s so I could feel close to Enid and Tom and the bag ladies and Hawk and Seth Sandroff and the whole gang.

This book is the story of one of those summers that starts out ordinary and turns into magic, and it is the story of how trying to transform yourself really just shows you who you were all along.

This book just taught me so much. It taught me how your life and your very self can be forever changed by people you would have never expected to change you. Perhaps most importantly, it taught me that people are often not what they seem.

Romance, intrigue, danger, and pathos ~ that summer, Enid’s life ended up having all of those things. And because of these characters, so did mine.

And so I’ll love this book forever.

A week never goes by that I do not have a customer telling me that they are reading the HARRY POTTER books aloud to their 5 or 6 year old child, and the pride in their voice is always evident. Using HARRY POTTER as a sign that a child was ready for long read-alouds or that they are an advanced reader annoyed me when the books were still in publishing process, and now that the series is finished, I am even more over it than before. Eight times out of ten, when I ask a parent what kind of book their child enjoys or what they’ve read lately, the answer is “Well, they’ve read all the Harry Potter books.” (The other two times the answer is “Well, they’ve read all the WIMPY KID books,” but that is a rant for another post.) (And honestly, pretty much every kid reads the HARRY POTTER books – so that doesn’t tell me much about anyone’s reading preferences.)

If you are reading HP to your kids before you have read them the RAMONA books, LITTLE HOUSE ON THE PRAIRIE, the FUDGE books, most of Cynthia Rylant, A CRICKET IN TIMES SQUARE, STUART LITTLE, and most of Roald Dahl, just to name a fraction of the available books, then your kids are not ready for HP. Shorter books do not equal bad. It is okay to finish a read-aloud quickly. It is okay to tell your child that they are not old enough for HP yet. And at six years old, they’re just not old enough. Why the need to jump ahead? Why not start with books that are meant for kids their age or closer to their age?

Some reasons, not in order of importance, of why kids should wait for Harry:

1. The majority of these parents ultimately come back and tell me that they have had to stop reading the series (usually right around book 3) because their child got scared. Usually these parents did not listen to my careful, polite warnings that this would happen. There is no way around the fact that Voldemort starts picking off Harry’s friends and family one at a time, and that this gets worse, not better. The HP books are amazing, yes. I am and always will be a giant HP nerd. But the books run the gamut from scary to downright terrifying; the darkness gets darker and darker with less and less reprieve as the series winds to a close. Somehow while watching Daniel Radcliffe, Rupert Grint and Emma Watson grow up, a lot of us seem to have forgotten that these books are aimed at a middle-grade (and up) readership. This leads me to number

2. While children of that age are ripe for the worlds of make-believe (which is why so many parents want to read them HARRY POTTER), they are not ready to process the idea that all fantasy worlds are not created equal. While they are certainly ready for the happier things in HP – deep friendship, magic, humor, magical creatures, mystical objects, education, love, loyalty, etc – they are not ready to process HP’s darker themes of racism, classism, abuse, hatred, death, war, self-loathing, self-doubt, betrayal, and pure evil.

3. If they hear HP aloud at a young age (especially if it ultimately scares them), there is a decent-to-good chance they will not go back and read the books to themselves when old enough to process them in their entirety.

4. There are, at last count, about ninety billion trillion other books to read to them first. Books that satisfy that need for magic and make-believe without the darkness that HP wraps those things in. Books that a lot of kids are skipping, or having skipped for them.

PLACES TO START (I’m listing fantastical stories only, since this is a “please wait for HP” post):

WINNIE THE POOH. Disney has caused practically an entire generation to forget that the books are about forty-five trillion times better than the animated cartoons.

TOYS GO OUT by Emily Jenkins, which joined the ranks of classic read-alouds immediately upon publication. This story of three toys who live in a little girl’s bedroom and have adventures has never failed me. No, it is not just like TOY STORY, I promise. It is actually nothing like TOY STORY. It is the number-one bestselling children’s book in our shop.

A BEAR CALLED PADDINGTON and sequels by Michael Bond. A great many of you adults missed this charming British series about a sweet bear from Peru who gets found in Paddington Station with a tag on his coat reading “Please look after this bear. Thank you.” The family that finds him does indeed look after him, and gets a handful of fun and trouble in the process.

THE CRICKET IN TIMES SQUARE by George Selden, in which a hungry country cricket jumps into a New Yorker’s picnic basket and winds up in Times Square. His adventures with Tucker Mouse, Harry Cat, and Mario, the boy who discovers him in the subway newsstand owned by his parents, have stuck with me my whole life.

THE MOUSE AND THE MOTORCYCLE and sequels by Beverly Cleary. (I will gently remind those who might argue that this is not a fantasy that the main character is a talking mouse.)

PIPPI LONGSTOCKING by Astrid Lindgren. The Lauren Child-illustrated read-aloud edition that came out a few years ago is fantastic.

TIME AT THE TOP by Edward Ormondroyd – no one has ever heard of this book, but it’s so good. Purple House Press reissued it, bless them. Susan discovers that the elevator in the building where she lives can actually take her back into the past.

THE LIGHTHOUSE FAMILY books by Cynthia Rylant, beginning with THE STORM. Utterly charming series about a cat who’s a lighthouse keeper and the shipwrecked dog and mice who become her family.

NO FLYING IN THE HOUSE by Betty Brock. Annabel Tippens is cared for not by parents, but by a talking dog named Gloria. When a wicked cat named Belinda tells Annabel that she’s actually half-fairy, Annabel must choose between her old life with Gloria and a new life filled with magic.

THE TALE OF DESPERAUX by Kate DiCamillo. Please, please read the book before you show your children the movie. The story of a large-eared mouse, the princess he loves, a light-loving rat and a dim servant girl is one of the most magical stories ever written.

THE DOLL PEOPLE and sequels by Ann M. Martin and Laura Godwin with fabulous illustrations by Caldecott Medal winner Brian Selznick. It is, I would venture to say, impossible not to love these talking dolls and their adventures.

anything by Edward Eager; I like to start with HALF MAGIC. Children discover a coin that is magic – well, half magic, anyway. This makes its wish-granting powers a…little hard to predict. Charming, charming, charming.

Laurel Snyder’s Edward Eager-inspired ANY WHICH WALL. Four children discover a wall that can take them to any place, in any time. Also super charming, and a worthy homage to the above.

MY FATHER’S DRAGON by Ruth Stiles Gannett, in which the narrator’s father runs away to rescue a baby dragon on a faraway island.

Kids get rushed through so many things nowadays. Don’t rush them past some of the greatest read-alouds ever written. And if you have a young, high-level reading child (6, 7, 8), I would offer the same advice that I offer for read-alouds. It’s okay for your child to go through books very quickly. It doesn’t matter how quickly they read – there are plenty of books that are more appropriate for their emotional maturity than HP and other upper middle-grade books. If you have more suggestions, please put them in the comments!

(Not only would I wait on HP, I would wait on the Narnia books, Susan Cooper’s THE DARK IS RISING series, Lloyd Alexander’s PRYDAIN CHRONICLES, Rick Riordan’s PERCY JACKSON AND THE OLYMPIANS, Angie Sage’s SEPTIMUS HEAP series, Madeleine L’Engle’s TIME QUARTET, Trenton Lee Stewart’s MYSTERIOUS BENEDICT SOCIETY series and just about every middle-grade fantasy series or standalone novel that you can think of.)