The Fairy Tale, painting by James Saint in 1845
TOP 10 CHILDREN’S FANTASY BOOKS
“The baby has known the dragon intimately ever since he had an imagination. What the fairy tale provides for him is a St. George to kill the dragon.”
I’ve ranked my Top 10 Fantasy Books as well as special and honorable mentions, but fantasy is perhaps unparalleled among genres for the prevalence and significance of its sub-genre written for or read by children or young people – children’s fantasy in other words. It’s perhaps even more prevalent and significant when considered in the converse direction – that is, not what proportion of fantasy is books or stories for children, but what proportion of books or stories for children is fantasy. Indeed, I’d be prepared to bet that fantasy is predominant among stories for children – and not just in books but across all media. That probably says something about childhood and human nature in general, perhaps a predisposition to fantasy or magic in imagination.
Anyway, here are my Top 10 Children’s Fantasy Books – or Top 10 Children’s Fantasy Literature. Note that two entries – my top two entries – are duplicates of special mentions for my Top 10 Fantasy Books, reflecting their god-tier or top-tier significance not only for childrens’ fantasy but for fantasy in general. Otherwise, the top ten is predominated by the iconic classics of children’s fantasy, particularly that cluster of classics from Victorian and Edwardian literature through to the 1920s.
S-TIER (GOD TIER)
Little Red Riding Hood and the Wolf in the Forest – painting by Carl Larsson in 1881, profile image of Wikipedia “Fairy Tale” (public domain image)
(1) FAIRY TALES
“Fairy tales do not give the child the idea of the evil or the ugly; that is in the child already because it is in the world already…What fairy tales give the child is his first clear idea of the possible defeat of (evil). The baby has known the dragon intimately ever since he had an imagination. What the fairy tale provides for him is a St George to kill the dragon” – G.K. Chesterton
Unfortunately, the term fairy tale tends to be used dismissively for stories only for children – although the best children’s literature arguably speaks to all ages – or even pejoratively for obvious fanciful falsehoods or “happily ever after” wishful thinking.
To that, one could argue that such preconceptions don’t even apply to those stories commonly called fairy tales, except in their modern incarnations, particularly their modern cinematic and television adaptations. Perhaps such preconceptions might be avoided by one of their alternative names – of which my favorites are wonder tales or the German term marchen – but the term fairy tale is too deeply ingrained in popular consciousness or imagination.
Whatever the name, a fairy tale is a “short story that belongs to the folklore genre” or a “specific type” of fantastic folktale. Ironically, not many fairy tales actually feature fairies – the fairy in the name of fairy tale refers more to fairy as a place or setting, the fairy lands or otherworlds of folklore and mythology but taking on a more generic meaning as a place of magic. Such stories do indeed typically feature magic and enchantments as well as “mythical or fanciful beings”, fairies or otherwise, although some stories such as Bluebeard don’t have any explicit magic or supernatural elements.
“Fairy tales were originally intended for all ages, but for a long period of time, they were only written or presented as children’s stories”, particularly in their cinematic adaptations by Disney. Many fairy tales were extraordinarily dark in their original form – some to the point of verging on horror – and some remain so in their modern versions, even if only by way of lingering hints or subtext. Ironically again, there is a countervailing trend within popular culture to revert fairy tales to their darker and edgier roots – or to subvert them as more adult deconstructions (or reconstructions), as well as parodies or satires (or the trope of “fractured fairy tales”).
The demarcation between fairy tales and legends or fables can be fuzzy. Fairy tales tend to be distinguished from legends by some degree of belief in historicity or veracity for their events, location or people. By contrast, fairy tales tend to be more timeless – “once upon a time” – and set in their own space distinct from our own world. Fables tend to focus more on the moral of a story as their definitive element.
“Fairy tales are found in cultures all over the world” and with “widespread variants”, but “only a tiny handful of them are widely known in modern culture”. They have a span to match their geographic scale – “many of today’s fairy tales have evolved from centuries-old stories that have appeared with variations, in multiple cultures around the world”. Fairy tales in literary form are relatively modern, mostly evolving from their predecessors in oral form or tradition. This makes “the history of the fairy tale…particularly difficult to trace because often only the literary forms survive”, but even so some fairy tales may date back thousands of years to the Bronze Age or the beginnings of civilization and writing itself.
“What fairy tales do share is a distinct and consistent set of narrative conventions. They usually take place “once upon a time”, in a setting that’s familiar but usually broadly generic, with few (if any) references to real people, places or events…typically told in an extremely spare and laconic style, using archetypical characters and locations”. That style was cited by Italo Calvino as a prime example of “quickness” in literature.
JRR Tolkien famously used the term for literary fantasy, including his own, in his essay “On Fairy-Stories” – an essay well worth reading for its philosophy of literary fantasy and Tolkien’s own writing. Like others who have pointed out that even traditional fairy tales tended not to involve fairies as such, Tolkien defined fairy tales as “stories about the adventures of men in Faerie, the land of fairies, fairytale princes and princesses, dwarves, elves, and not only magical species but many other marvels”. However, by either definition of fairy tale, it is worth remembering that Tolkien’s definitive literary fantasy, “The Lord of the Rings” (and even more so “The Hobbit”), would qualify as (extended) fairy tales – with elves, dwarves, goblins and trolls that have all been regarded as types of fairies.
RATING: 5 STARS*****
S-TIER (GOD TIER – OR IS THAT ONCE UPON A TIER?)
A-TIER (TOP TIER)
Cover of The Annotated Alice, combining both books, Penguin 2001 (the edition I own)
(2) LEWIS CARROLL –
ALICE’S ADVENTURES IN WONDERLAND / THROUGH THE LOOKING GLASS (1865-1871)
“Curiouser and curiouser”…
Few fantasies are as iconic as Lewis Carroll’s classic Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and its sequel Through the Looking Glass (although the two books are often merged in popular culture) – which for simplicity I’ll conflate with their protagonist, Alice.
Through the vivid imagery or encounters of her adventures, as well as their potential symbolic allusions, Alice has lent herself readily to adaptation and popular imagination.
Allusions to Alice have earned their own trope on TV Tropes, which notes that the original novels can be associated with surreal or psychedelic fantasy, drug imagery (as in Jefferson Airplane’s White Rabbit), gothic horror and other aspects of Victorian England, such as steampunk.
As TV Tropes notes, “the name ‘Alice’, when used in a reference to Alice in Wonderland, therefore tends to be used for fantastical, ethereal characters or concepts, and that goes double if her last name is a variation on Carroll” (or Liddell – but more about that later). Other frequent references include white rabbits or going down the rabbit hole (as in The Matrix) – into a world of the hero’s journey that doesn’t conform to real world logic (and in which our heroine has to use intuition, a good heart, and an ability to acquire allies).
Not to mention white rabbits, cats and tea parties – or Mad Hatters. While we’re here, I should also note cards and chess as the premise for each of the settings in Wonderland and beyond the looking-glass respectively.
As for Alice herself, Lewis Carroll described her (when writing on her personality in “Alice on the Stage”) as “wildly curious, and with the eager enjoyment of Life that comes only in the happy hours of childhood, when all is new and fair, and when Sin and Sorrow are but names — empty words signifying nothing!”. I can’t think of a better – or more endearing – description than that.
For Carroll, there was, at least to some extent, a real Alice – Alice Pleasance Liddell, who inspired Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, when she asked Carroll to tell her a story on a boating trip in Oxford. The extent to which his character can be identified with Alice Liddell is not clear (and the brunette Liddell certainly did not resemble the blonde illustrations in the original book by cartoonist Sir John Tenniel). However, there are direct links to Liddell in the books – they are set on her birthday and her half birthday six months later (with the corresponding age), they are dedicated to her and the letters of her name are featured in an acrostic poem in the sequel.
As Catherine Robson wrote in Men in Wonderland – “In all her different and associated forms—underground and through the looking glass, textual and visual, drawn and photographed, as Carroll’s brunette or Tenniel’s blonde or Disney’s prim miss…in novel, poem, satire, play, film, cartoon, newspaper, magazine, album cover or song—Alice is the ultimate cultural icon, available for any and every form of manipulation, and as ubiquitous today as in the era of her first appearance.”
RATING:
A-TIER (TOP TIER)
Cover art hardcover annotated centenniel edition W.W. Norton & Co 2010 (the edition I own)
(3) L. FRANK BAUM –
THE WONDERFUL WIZARD OF OZ (1900)
“I’ve got a feeling we’re not in Kansas anymore”
Better known these days from the 1939 cinematic adaptation – shortened to The Wizard of Oz – than from the original novel The Wonderful Wizard of Oz by L. Frank Baum, the story and its female protagonist Dorothy Gale remain iconic in modern fantasy.
Through Dorothy’s adventures with their vivid imagery and characters, not least the central trio of her companions in the original novel and cinematic adaptation – the Scarecrow, the Tinman, and the Cowardly Lion – the book and its protagonist Dorothy have remained rich sources of adaptations and allusions throughout popular culture.
Dorothy is fundamentally (mid-western) American, befitting the protagonist of what was intended as a modern American fairy tale. She’s a Kansas farm girl, although she subsequently becomes a princess of Oz and lives there, in the numerous sequels which lack the iconic status of the first book. She’s an orphan raised by her Aunt Em and Uncle Henry, with her equally iconic dog Toto. Famously, she and Toto are swept up in a tornado to the Land of Oz.
However, Dorothy is more iconic in popular culture through the 1939 cinematic adaptation (portrayed by Judy Garland) than her original novels. Her appearance was never set out in the books, so that her cinematic appearance has become iconic – although it did retain the literary description of her clothing as her trademark blue and white gingham dress. Otherwise, the film condensed the novel – but most significantly altered the ending, that it was all just a dream – unlike the original novel, where it was all definitely real.
RATING:
A-TIER (TOP TIER)
Cover annotated centennial edition published by W.W. Norton & Company in 2014 (the edition I own)
(4) J.M. BARRIE –
PETER PAN (1904-1911)
Peter Pan, the fictional character created by Scottish novelist and playwright J.M. Barrie, needs little introduction but I’ll quote one anyway.
“A free-spirited and mischievous young boy who can fly and never grows up, he spends his never-ending childhood having adventures on the mythical island of Neverland as the leader of the Lost Boys, interacting with fairies, pirates, mermaids, Native Americans, and occasionally ordinary children from the world outside Neverland…Peter Pan has become a cultural icon symbolising youthful innocence and escapism”.
On the topic of fairies, I can’t mention Peter Pan without his fairy companion Tinkerbell.
However, there are some things I might be able to introduce about him.
The first major appearance of Peter Pan was in a play rather than the novel he is better remembered by – the 1904 stage play by Barrie, Peter Pan: or The Boy Who Wouldn’t Grow Up (although that was preceded by his appearance in another of Barrie’s works, The Little White Bird in 1902), before the play was expanded into the 1911 novel, Peter and Wendy.
“The original play is fairy Child-Friendly: Captain Hook is a blustering comic villain, the violence is usually a pratfall or similar form of slapstick, and death is treated more like a time-out. In contrast, the book version (Peter and Wendy) later written by Barrie is a sly deconstruction of the Victorian notion of the sacred innocence of children, full of parental bonus dark humor and subtle gallows humor; Barrie was a master satirist for his time, though few of his satires are remembered today.”
However, Peter Pan is an archetypal magical trickster hero – “a playful demigod, with aspects of Puck and Pan” (the latter even in his name) and “a cultural symbol of youthful exuberance and innocence”. And I just can’t resist the revival of Pan, that most pagan of classical pagan gods – indeed one that came to embody classical paganism – as a trickster hero of children’s fantasy. Not to mention giving him a thoroughly Dionysian character and – particularly for the proverbial boy who never grew up – a veritable harem of fairies, mermaids and Wendy Darling.
And of course there’s his love of adventure among the Lost Boys fighting pirates, including the ‘adventure’ of his own mortality
“The story of Peter Pan has been a popular one for adaptation into other media” – film, both live-action and animated, stage plays or musicals, television, comics and so on, with perhaps the best known as the 1953 Disney animated film.
RATING:
A-TIER (TOP TIER)
Covers Winnie-the-Pooh and The House at Pooh Corner with the original illustrations by Ernest H. Shepard
(5) A.A. MILNE –
WINNIE THE POOH / THE HOUSE AT POOH CORNER (1926-1928)
Everyone’s favorite beast fable!
I mean, it is essentially a beast fable, isn’t it? And yes – I know the “beasts” are the stuffed toy animals of the author’s son Christopher Robin Milne, although Winnie himself was also inspired by an actual zoo bear of that name. I think the Pooh part came from comically grandiose titles like Grand Poobah, itself originating from a character Pooh-bah in a Gilbert and Sullivan play.
“Winnie-the-Pooh is a British children’s book written in 1926 by author A.A. Milne. The original book of stories was, famously, inspired by Milne’s son Christopher Robin Milne and Christopher’s assortment of stuffed animals, including a teddy bear that became Winnie-the-Pooh, a tiger that became Tigger, and a donkey that became Eeyore. Pooh and his friends live in a Forest inspired by Ashdown Forest in Sussex, where Milne had a cottage.”
It was followed by the 1928 sequel House at Pooh Corner, although there are also some references to the characters in Milne’s collections of poetry.
And that pretty much sums up what has become a media franchise.
Except perhaps that the Disney media franchise is such that “Disney estimates that merchandise based on the Pooh characters brings in as much revenue as merchandise featuring the characters Mickey Mouse, Minnie Mouse, Donald Duck, Goofy, and Pluto combined”.
It’s not hard to see why – the Pooh characters are just so darn endearing, while also representative of human personality types or emotional aspects that readily lend themselves to all sorts of allegorical interpretations.
Of those, my favorite would be The Tao of Pooh (and its sequel the Te of Piglet), in which Pooh represents the ideal balance of Taoism or at least a happy mean between the melancholy of Eeyore and the over-enthusiasm of Tigger, the latter being my favorite character.
In looking up this entry’s articles on Wikipedia and TV Tropes, I was delighted to learn that Christopher Robin’s original stuffed animals have been preserved and are on public display, except poor Roo “who was lost in an apple orchard around 1930” (itself something that sounds so…Milnesian). On that note, I had a stuffed Tigger as my favorite toy as a young child, which might have something to do with him enduring as my favorite character.
RATING:
A-TIER (TOP TIER)
B-TIER (HIGH TIER)
Cover of hardcover Aesop’s Fables Classic Edition illustrated by Charles Santore (New York Times bestselling illustrator) published by Applesauce Press in 2018. Aesop’s most famous fable character, the tortoise (from The Tortoise and the Hare) is front and center winning the race!
(6) AESOP’S FABLES
The most famous anthology of fables – notably beast fables – in European culture, attributed to Aesop, a Greek slave and later freedman, “living somewhere in Asia Minor in the sixth century BC”, if indeed he existed at all. There was a tendency for subsequent European fables to be attributed to him as well – or at least added to collections of his fables.
And the most famous of Aesop’s fables would have to be The Tortoise and the Hare – slow and steady wins the race, illustrating the moral of the story as characteristic of fables, usually but not always explicitly pointed out at the end. Indeed, TV Tropes has dubbed the use of the moral of the story an “aesop”.
Of course, there’s a lot more fables by (or attributed to) Aesop – more than enough for a top ten Aesop’s fables many times over.
RATING:
B-TIER (HIGH TIER)
Cover leatherbound Arabian Nights edition published in 2011 by Canterbury Classics
(7) ARABIAN NIGHTS
Also known as One Thousand and One Nights, the Arabian Nights are essentially Middle Eastern fairy tales or folk tales compiled from Arabic. The Arabian part of Arabian Nights is a bit of a misnomer – as the stories originate from the Middle East, central Asia, South Asia, and North Africa (as well as some with origins back to Persian or even Mesopotamian stories). Heck – Aladdin is even ostensibly set in China!
And there’s another heck right there. The three most well known tales of the Arabian Nights – Aladdin, Ali Baba, and Sinbad – were not part of the original Arabian Nights but were added to it by European translators and I understand Sinbad even traces its influences back to Homer’s Odyssey.
What is part of all variations of the Arabian Nights is the framing device of Scheherazade, one of the most tongue-twisting names (and most mind-boggling to spell), at least for those from Anglophone nations, which is why I prefer the Persian variant of Shahrazad. You may know her as simply the most famous and significant female character of the Arabian Nights, indeed without whom they wouldn’t exist according to their own narrative – the plucky heroine and narrator in the frame story, who told all one thousand tales in the titular one thousand and one nights.
As the story goes, the monarch Shahryar discovered his first wife was unfaithful to him and resolved upon the monstrously misogynistic plan to marry a new virgin every day and behead her the following day to avoid betrayal or dishonour. Betrayal or dishonour by her to him, that is – I’m not too sure that executing your wife the next day is quite in the spirit of marriage and certainly had the bride gagging in her wedding vows for death to do them part.
Anyway, the vizier ran out of virgins of noble blood and so Shahrazad, the vizier’s own daughter, volunteered to be the next bride, against her father’s wishes. Fortunately, Shahrazad had a plan – which was to tell the monarch a story on that first night, but leaving it on a cliffhanger at dawn, so the monarch postponed her execution until the next day for her to finish that story – which she did the next night, but started an even more exciting story, leaving that one too on a cliffhanger. And so on for a thousand nights or about three years, until she finally ran out of stories but the monarch had genuinely fallen in love with her, decreeing her to be his wife for life rather than execution the next day – although it might be noted that she had borne him three sons as well in this time. And so they lived happily ever after.
Or not, because I have difficulty imagining that Shahrazad did not have post-traumatic stress disorder after that – or why the monarch Shahryar deserved to live happily ever after executing so many innocent women. Indeed, one woman each day for three years, or approximately 1,100 women – at least according to British adventurer Sir Richard Burton in his translation, which makes Shahrazad’s heroism a little less impressive, given she sat on her plan for that time. Also the similarity of her name with that of the monarch suggests it was an honorific, either named as such after she was married to him – or named for him by her father, the monarch’s vizier.
But I prefer to overlook these things, as what’s not to love about her? Beautiful, intelligent, heroic and she tells a good story – indeed, a thousand of them.
RATING:
B-TIER (HIGH TIER)
Promotional art used for The Jungle Book film on the Disney channel (fair use)
(8) RUDYARD KIPLING –
JUNGLE BOOKS & JUST SO STORIES (1894-1895 & 1902)
Kipling was incredibly prolific, such that he won the 1907 Nobel Prize for Literature and was considered for British Poet Laureate – and yet he is best known for his children’s fantasy in The Jungle Book and its sequel, The Second Jungle Book.
In part that may be because they are less tainted by the political controversy that attaches to his works these days, given that Kipling was the quintessential poet of the British Empire, the Victorian Virgil as it were.
However, mostly I think it comes from the sheer mythic resonance of the Jungle Books that has endured for children and adults since their publication, reflecting Kipling’s undoubted literary skill as well as “a versatile and luminous narrative gift”.
It helps that it pre-empted Tarzan as jungle hero, except with its protagonist Mowgli as a feral child raised by wolves rather than apes – invoking mythic characters who were similarly raised by wolves, most notably the founders of Rome, Romulus and Remus.
It also helps that it was adapted by Disney in both animated and live action versions, although it is disappointing that the latter didn’t take the opportunity to restore the python Kaa as heroic savior of Mowgli rather than villainous antagonist. Still, I can perhaps forgive the live-action version as it had Kaa voiced by Scarlet Johansson. I’d be hypnotized by her too – she could slither her coils around me anytime.
But for the iconic popularity of The Jungle Book, I’d be almost tempted to substitute his anthology Just So Stories, akin to myths with the flavor of fairy tales or beast fables explaining such things as how the elephant got its trunk (usually the cover art of the collection) or how the kangaroo got its legs.
RATING:
B-TIER (HIGH TIER)
Cover art of the 1989 paperback edition (featuring the original artwork by Ernest Shephard, best known for his illustrations in this book and the Winnie the Pooh books)
(9) KENNETH GRAHAME –
THE WIND IN THE WILLOWS (1908)
“Beloved 1908 children’s novel by British author Kenneth Grahame, set in an idealized England of the late Victorian to early Edwardian Era. It details the adventures and misadventures of four variably anthropomorphic animals living around the banks of The River.”
‘Nuff said, except to note that those four animals are Mole, Ratty, Mr. Toad, and Mr. Badger.
And that it is based on bedtime stories by Grahame for his son, as well as that “has been adapted numerous times for both stage and screen”.
The highlight for me is of course the glorious paganism of the god Pan in the chapter “The Piper at the Gates of Dawn”. Such is Pan’s power that he has no connection to the main plot yet muscles himself into a chapter that is effectively a side-quest – hence is often left out of adaptations. Blasphemy! Io Pan! Io Pan Pan!
RATING:
B-TIER (HIGH TIER)
Cover 2012 Harper Collins (media tie-in) edition
(10) E.B. WHITE – CHARLOTTE’S WEB (1952)
“Some pig”.
I mean, what else do you need to know than that message written in a spider’s web, which effectively states the premise of this classic children’s fantasy that has been heartwarming American audiences since publication.
I suppose I can expand on that a little more – it tells the story of a farm livestock pig Wilbur and his friendship with a barn spider Charlotte, who saves him from the usual fate of farm livestock pigs by writing messages about him in her web.
Ah, Charlotte – the only spider this arachnophobe may ever like or even love (but not in the sense of the twisted parody that the animated series Drawn Together did of it, now sadly forever etched in my mind).
This is of course a book that could never have been written in Australia.
Also, I’m sorry, Wilbur, but you’d just be too delicious as bacon.
RATING:
B-TIER (HIGH TIER)
