I loved children’s books when I was a child and I love them still. This site is play for me, sharing books I have found joyful, inspiring, moving, uplifting, heartwarming, heart-opening, eye-opening, insightful, wise – all qualities that nurture the spirit. Hence the title of this site.
Though all the books here touch the spirit in some way, you will also find a spiritual category which draws together books with a particular focus on the spirit.
If you follow the link with any review to Bookshop.org and make a purchase, independent bookshops benefit financially and I also receive a commission.
Christopher Sell
- The God Boy by Ian Cross
New Zealand setting and New Zealand author, this was first published in 1957 and reissued as a Penguin Classics in the early 2000s. It has been deservedly held in high regard, though on occasion set as a school text for teenagers and therefore hated by some of them. It is certainly a novel for older… - Carbonel by Barbara Sleigh
Written and set in the nineteen-fifties, I’m not surprised it remains in print seventy years later. Barbara Sleigh writes deftly, weaving her plot as cunningly as a witch’s garland, and as discreetly. She manages to make magic both magic and ordinary. It fits convincingly into Rosemary’s world of quiet getting by in a flat with… - The Boy from Mars by Simon James
With engaging, nicely-written text and easy flowing illustrations, this is a warm and helpful book. - The Weight of Water by Sarah Crossan
A familiar kind of story – 12-year-old Kasienka thrown into an unfamiliar world, Coventry from Gdansk, because her mother is determined to find her fled father. There’s friendship and false friends, first boyfriend, found father, but it’s complicated. And there’s swimming; Kasienka is friends with water, knows it and understands it. But there’s an unfamiliar… - The Woman Who Turned Children Into Birds by David Almond
What a delight! David Almond’s typically powerful and subtle writing, beautifully enhanced by Laura Carlin’s artwork. The whole book sings. Mysterious Nanty Solo comes to town. A Pied Piper who is not abductor, but liberator. She frees the children and the children free the adults. Happy town. Buy through Bookshop.org - The Dark is Rising by Susan Cooper
Will is shifting out of childhood. The world reveals itself differently to him. Archetypal energies move back and forth between myth and modern times; the Rider, the Walker appear as the troubling friend of his father, the tramp mobbed by crows. The power of the light emerges out of the neighbouring farmer or the lady… - The Tree Lady by H Joseph Hopkins
This is Katherine Olivia Sessions’ story. A tree planter who made a life-enhancing contribution to San Diego, the city that became her home. And in demonstrating the possibility of greening an apparently unpromising environment she set an example that spread across the world and forward to our own time, when tree planting feels more important… - Keats’s Neighborhood: An Ezra Jack Keats Treasury
“If we could see each other exactly as the other is,” Ezra Jack Keats wrote, “this would be a different world.” The son of Polish immigrants escaping anti-Jewish pogroms in Europe, the world he grew up in was Brooklyn, New York. Ezra’s family had always been poor but during the Great Depression of the 1930s, along…