The best children's book ever written (***In my humble opinion)

I simply love the topic this month: Share you favorite children's book.
Honestly, this was the fastest blog piece I've ever penned.

On my own blog, Writing in my Oxygen, I've talked numerous times over the years about my number one book for children, the one I always give as a gift to expectant mothers, or when I've been invited to toddler birthday parties.

That book is THE LITTLE ENGINE THAT COULD, written by Watty Piper and illustrated by Dan Santat.

Now, I'm going to be honest and tell you I didn't read this book as a child. In fact, I'd never heard of it until my own daughter was born, 30 years ago. The book was given to me as part of a baby shower gift and when I read it after every one had gone home, I fell absolutely, head to toes in love with the message within its pages.

Self motivation and self actualization flow from this story so effortlessly, that even as an adult I was rooting for that little engine to get up over the mountain. The theme of the book - believing in yourself - is such a wonderful, universal theme that even today in various aspects of my life I find myself thinking you can do it at times when I am questioning myself.

That little engine told himself time and time again, around every twisty curve, up every steep hill,  I think I can. The phrase is repeated so many times in the book THAT should be the title! I THINK I CAN.

The best part of the tale - for me - is the ending where the engine, having gone over the punishing mountain, around all the dangerous, twists and turns, and has reached his final destination declares, I knew I could.

As adults, how many times have we felt that we couldn't go on? Complete a task? Even make it through another day of seemingly insurmountable problems? In this day and age and with so many things coming up on a daily basis that require our time, focus, and energy, there are moments when we all feel that we just can't go on. We can't take on one more project, tackle one more dilemma, deal with one more emotional issue. It just gets to be...too much.

The message of The Little Engine that Could is to just believe that you can do anything you set your mind to if you, in fact, believe you can do it.

For me, personally, I would never have tackled a brand new writing career at the age of 55 if I didn't have some of that little engine's gumption in the back of my mind. I thought I could write something people would read. I thought I could get what I wrote published. I knew I'd made my dream come true when my very first publisher bought my book.

Self actualization and belief in yourself are things we should teach our children from the get-go in life. That's why I now give this book at every baby shower I attend, and at most children's birthday parties I'm honored to be invited to.

Believe in yourself...as Martha Stewart says, "It's a good thing."

My newest book, a fairy tale redux of Sleeping Beauty, titled WOKE, releases on 7.1.2020. In my version, Aurora doesn't wait for love's true kiss to awaken her...

Waking up each day is a gift….

On her 21st birthday, someone slipped a potent drug combination into socialite Aurora Brightwell’s champagne putting her in a coma for the next ten years. It’s been a long road back, and it’s time to reclaim the life she lost and find out exactly what happened on that fateful night.

Financier Kincade Enright has his own reason for helping Aurora discover who poisoned her, but for the time being he’s keeping that - and his true identity - to himself. What he can’t keep hidden though, are his growing feelings for the one-time paparazzi darling and party-girl.

When this prince of finance joins forces with the former sleeping beauty, nothing can stop them from finding the answers they seek…or prevent the powerful emotions developing between them as they search for the truth.

Peggy Jaeger writes contemporary romances and rom coms about strong women, the families who support them, and the men who can’t live without them.

Family and food play huge roles in Peggy’s stories because she believes there is nothing that holds a family structure together like sharing a meal…or two…or ten. Dotted with humor and characters that are as real as they are loving, Peggy brings all aspects of life into her stories: life, death, sibling rivalry, illness, and the desire for everyone to find their own happily ever after. Growing up the only child of divorced parents she longed for sisters, brothers and a family that vowed to stick together no matter what came their way. Through her books, she has created the families she wanted as that lonely child.

As a lifelong diarist, she caught the blogging bug early on, and you can visit her at peggyjaeger.com where she blogs daily about life, writing, and stuff that makes her go "What??!"

You can connect with Peggy here: : Tweet Me//Read Me// Visit Me//Picture Me//Pin Me//Friend Me// Triber// Book Me

TOO MANY TO COUNT by Eleri Grace

Oh, children’s books – one of my favorite topics! I’m supposed to pick just one? Yeah, I don’t think I can do that. Not only do I have my own childhood favorites, but now I have treasured memories of special books that I shared with each of my children. One of my Pandemic Projects was to reorganize my library shelves, clearing out some books to be sold on Amazon or donated. I must have spent an entire morning happily flipping through some of our favorite books on the children’s shelves. 

Here are our favorites for youngest readers: my personal favorites were Go Dog Go, Teddy Bear of Bumpkin Hollow, and The Jungle Book (Little Golden Book version). My daughter’s favorite board book was Going on a Bear Hunt, while my son preferred The Monster at the End of the Book.

 

In preschool and kindergarten, my daughter’s personal favorite was Paper Bag Princess,

which is an absolutely fabulous "girl power" book if you've not read it. My son, to my delight, loved not only fairy tales but also turned increasingly to the “fractured fairy tales” that take an unusual twist on the familiar stories. He had gone through a stage of only wanting to read picture books with construction vehicles, trains, cars, any sort of vehicle at all, so the fairy tale stage was a welcome change of pace. These are some of his favorites. We read the Steven Kellogg version of The Three Little Pigs so many times he could recite it in dramatic fashion from memory.

My favorite elementary school books included Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House series. I’ve remained a steadfast fan of her work into adulthood – for many years, I researched her life with the intention of writing an adult biography. Though that biography project has been set aside (not to mention that Caroline Fraser’s recent Pulitzer-Prize winning biography probably undercuts the need for another one any time soon), Wilder’s books – and her late-blooming career as a novelist – continue to inspire me.

My daughter’s favorites from elementary school as depicted in this collage include a couple of choices that are a little on the dark side, but then, children’s literature has always had a dark vein. She had an ongoing love-hate relationship with Kathi Appelt’s The Underneath, re-reading it several times much to my surprise given how upset she was by the issues of animal cruelty.

My son and I enjoyed reading the Harry Potter series together when he was in 1^st and 2^nd grade, and he asked to listen to the audio versions on a continuous loop for several years after that. As a huge fan of Rowling’s classic series, I also read them with my daughter, though she was less enthusiastic. Even as a younger child, she was drawn to more realistic literature rather than fantasy (though I will note that she came to a later appreciation for both the books and films and now happily binges on the movies).

Here are my other favorite titles from later elementary school and into my junior high years. Where the Red Fern Grows was the first novel I cried over. Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret was a staple for tween girls in the 1970s and remains a popular choice today (my daughter read it). Though we didn’t then have a Young Adult literature section in bookstores or libraries, The Outsiders was an early example of literature aimed at a teenage audience, and it too has stood the test of time. 

I thoroughly enjoyed this month's prompt and hope I've passed along some appealing suggestions for good children's books you might enjoy all on your own or with your children or grandchildren.  

Learn more about me and my writing on my website, and you can also find me on Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, and Instagram. 

You can find my Clubmobile Girls books on Amazon

Books of the Heart!

By: Marcia King-Gamble

www.lovemarcia.com

I don’t remember ever not being able to read. It was my mother, a teacher, who told me I read at age three. The funny thing is she never officially taught me. What she did do, was having no babysitter, and hers being an easier, child-friendly island lifestyle, she’d take me to classes with her. While she was teaching, I apparently was taking it all in.  To this day, I am grateful for that early indoctrination because even now I am seldom without a book.  The print kind.

My dentist finds this particularly amusing. In a COVID environment she was forced to remove all the magazines from her waiting room, but she saved magazines in a special drawer for me, because she knows reading distracts me from whatever procedure I’m being subjected to.

I digress. This month is all about favorite children’s books and I'm not sure where to begin. Some of you may have heard this story before but I will tell it anyway.  I grew up on a tiny British island with maybe three book stores, when a new shipment of books came in, they were more valuable than gold.  My other resource for getting books was an aunt who lived in the United States. She’d send me what she could get her hands on, and I looked forward to her monthly package as eagerly as I looked forward to the Sunday ice cream treat. It was through this aunt I got a taste of books such as Rebecca of Sunny Brook Farms, Little Women, Nancy Drew, The Hardy Boys, and Bobbsey Twins.

Books were my great escape and my entire world. I found solitude from a busy household by burying my nose in a book. My favorite reading nook was under the bathroom sink, until I outgrew that spot. When things got tough, I escaped to my imaginary world.  Reading was a great way to experience a new world.

Most importantly, when  you live on a British island with limited T.V. channels if any, your reading material is typically British, and so is your humor. New books at the time were hard to come by, so you read anything you could get your hands on. 

That said, my introduction to Children’s books weren’t the usual. No Dick and Jane for me.  I may have read those when I turned eight, or was it ten and then out of sheer curiosity.

Charles Dickens, exposed me to a whole new world, and the Oxford dictionary became my best friend. Books like: Great Expectations, Oliver Twist, A Christmas Carol and A Tale of Two Cities, though rather advanced reading for a child, kept me busy, and focused in a house where air conditioning didn’t exist.

As an aside, and probably why I am a romance writer today, I read Mills and Boon at age six and hid them under the covers. Back then there was no sex. Not even a hint of it.

One of my favorite pieces of reading material growing up were the misadventures of Bessie and Billy Bunter. They were overweight British siblings who attended Greyfriars boarding school in England. Billy was constantly being bullied because he was overweight and was sly, sneaky and slothful.  Billy’s boarding school was this generations Hogwarts and Billy was our Harry Potter. His popularity produced his sister Bessie.

 Mind you, today, these books and cartoons would have been pulled from the shelves.  Billy was constantly being whipped (caned,) by the masters. He stole money orders, made bigoted comments, and he and Bessie lived to eat. Because of their size, (corpulent is being kind,) they were constantly made fun of. They were definitely not politically correct figures by anyone's standards. But back then these were amazingly popular books, if you weren't overly sensitive and  had a sense of humor.

Books like The Wind in the Willows and Wuthering Heights left an indelible mark. As a result, my perspective on life was far more advanced than most, and perhaps a wee bit too cynical. But  reading was a world I loved, and books helped shape me. Without books I wouldn’t be the person that I am today: fanciful, whimsical, and very much a child at heart.

All this to say, whether you’re four, five, or fifty-five, put your heart in a book. The best gift you can give a young one is reading material. You’ll never regret it. Books feed the heart.

Soon to be released!

About Marcia King-Gamble

Romance writer, Marcia King-Gamble originally hails from a sunny Caribbean island where the sky and ocean are the same mesmerizing shade of blue. This travel industry executive and current world traveler has spent most of life in the United States. A National Bestselling author, Marcia has penned over 34 books and 8 novellas. Her free time is spent at the gym, traveling to exotic locales, and caring for her animal family.

Visit Marcia at www.lovemarcia.com or “friend” her on Facebook: http://bit.ly/1MlnrIS

Be sure to join her mailing list.

The Children's' Book That Brought me Comfort by Dora Bramden

Since developing as a writer I’ve done a lot of reflective thinking about stories. I’ve discovered that my personal story, that is my life journey has a lot to do with the books I connected strongly with and resonated with me. More than that, it began in childhood.

I also was born with a medical condition that surfaced around age ten. This meant I had, what seemed to me, very long stays in the hospital. I suffered acutely the separation from family life and started to wonder if I would ever get to go home again. My only link was my mother’s daily visits. During those, she read Johanna Spyri’s ‘Heidi’ out loud to me.

I quickly became enraptured in the story of the Heidi, Grandfather, Peter, and the little goats. Although I was stuck in a hospital bed, while Mum read I was running barefoot on the grassy slopes with my new little friend.

I was so sad for Heidi when she was taken away to live with poor Clara. She had to live in the city away from everything she’d grown to love so dearly. There was a happy ending of course and Mum must have chosen this book with care, because Heidi eventually went home, better equipped for life than she was before.

There were lots of story points that resonated strongly with me and still do. I’ve reread it many times over during the years of my life, always gaining something else or being reminded of something important. After I was divorced and enduring an extreme sense of loss of my home and family, I read it again, taking solace in the message that struggle is often a gift, something hard to be learned or endured so that life can change and evolve. And taking comfort from spending time with my childhood friend, Heidi.

I have a new home and am married again.  I have someone to love and I’m loved in return by a kind-hearted man. We’re friendly with my ex and are able to celebrate family occasions altogether. When I got divorced, this was the dream I hung on to and it has come true. During the struggle between happy times, I held it in my heart that difficult times pass. I’ll always be grateful for the story of ‘Heidi’, read to me when I was a little girl who wasn't allowed to go home, because the story showed me I had reason to hope.

I have since learned that this hope has lasted all my life. I think it's why I'm drawn to writing romance novels, they are about hope which is expressed through finding a person love and who loves in return. It's about the creation of a new family and home filled with love. 

Dora Bramden writes heart-melting, passionate, romance.

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