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 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
Oscar and the Lady in Pink by Eric-Emmanuel Schmitt
Oscar is ten, in hospital and the last operation hasn’t worked. He needs a friend and Granny Rose, the visitor who says she is a retired wrestler (and she has thrilling accounts of past triumphs to demonstrate her veracity) suggests God. Oscar is dubious, but decides to write a letter to God each day, in
Amos & Boris by William Steig
A mouse and a whale best friends; there’s a challenge for a writer and artist to set himself. But William Steig was the man to tackle it. Best known now as creator of Shrek, he was growing up in New York during the Great Depression, found himself supporting his parents, dropped in and out of art
Five Children and It by E Nesbit
‘It’ is the Psammead, a gloriously grumpy sand fairy – and anything less fairylike in looks is hard to imagination, and all part of the great inclusive sweep of E. Nesbit’s arm as she draws you into her story – grants a wish a day. Each vanishes at sunset and each brings a whole heap
What the Dog Knows by Sylvia McNicoll
Naomi is having a bad time. Her Mom and Dad are splitting up, her beloved dog Diesel has died, and she’s probably dead as well. But it’s hard to be sure. Maybe she’s not, maybe she has a second chance. Diesel thinks so, because here he is alive again and talking to her in her
It’s a Book by Lane Smith
Fed up with electronic devices glued to your child – or to you? Here’s a nice way of addressing the habit that’s funny and clever, so it becomes a great bridge on which parent and child can meet and watch the river flowing and share viewpoints and find peace. Smart and stylish illustrations from Lane
Ajay and the Mumbai Sun by Varsha Shah
Ajay and his friends are the abandoned orphans of Mumbai station and children of the nearby slums. He is a boy with ambition and a mission and nothing and no one is going to stop him. Watch out world, here comes Ajay! His mother’s pen is all he has of her, and with it he
Mole in a Black and White Hole by Tereza Sediva
Mole’s good friend the pink chandelier, only colour in his underground world (apart from worms, of whom he seems a little scared) suddenly vanishes, leaving a hole to the sky and a world of colour. What might be a simple dark to light, monochrome to rainbow journey, is more subtle and more playful. I like
Lark in the Morn by Elfrida Vipont
We meet Kit, brought up by a well-meaning but uncomprehending cousin and a professor father, largely absent in all but body, as she discovers ‘if you can’t lead your own life, you’re not you at all.’ She comes to realise that she is a song bird and gradually she finds the courage to follow her