Themes
Books Told Through Young Eyes
Novels where a child's perspective transforms what we are able to see — about family, society and the adult world.
20 books · ranked
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1
Sophie's World
A teenager receives mysterious lessons that walk through the whole history of Western philosophy; a story and a course in one.
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2
The Hunger Games
A girl volunteers for a televised fight to the death to save her sister; a propulsive, sharp dystopian thriller.
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3
Persepolis
A girl grows up during and after the Iranian revolution; a witty, moving graphic memoir.
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4
The Fault in Our Stars
Two teenagers with cancer fall in love; funny and heartbreaking without ever being saccharine.
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5
Educated
A woman raised off-grid by survivalist parents finds her way to a PhD; an astonishing memoir of self-invention.
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6
Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone
An orphan learns he is a wizard and finds a home at a school of magic; the book that made a generation read.
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7
The Book Thief
A girl in Nazi Germany who steals books, narrated by Death itself; original, tender and devastating.
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8
Born a Crime
Growing up mixed-race under and after apartheid; funny, sharp and genuinely moving.
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9
The Hate U Give
A teenager witnesses a police shooting and finds her voice; urgent, powerful and humane.
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10
Atonement
A child's misunderstanding wrecks two lives; a novel about guilt, storytelling and the limits of saying sorry.
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11
All the Light We Cannot See
A blind French girl and a German boy whose paths cross in occupied France; luminous, intricate storytelling.
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12
Becoming
Michelle Obama's memoir traces her journey from the South Side of Chicago through Princeton, Harvard Law School, a career in public service and eight years in the White House. Intimate, politically engaged and carefully crafted, it is one of the bestselling memoirs ever published.
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13
Great Expectations
A blacksmith's boy, a mysterious fortune and the question of what really makes a gentleman — Dickens at his most personal.
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14
The Diary of a Young Girl
A teenage girl's diary while hiding from the Nazis; one of the most important and human documents of the century.
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15
Gone Girl
A wife vanishes and her husband becomes the prime suspect; the twisty thriller that redefined the genre.
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16
I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings
Maya Angelou's memoir of her childhood and adolescence in the American South and in California — the racism, the trauma and the gradual emergence of her voice through literature. One of the most widely assigned and most challenged memoirs in American education, it announces one of the great literary voices of the 20th century.
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17
Never Let Me Go
Three friends at a strange English boarding school slowly learn what they were made for; restrained and heartbreaking.
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18
The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo
Journalist Mikael Blomkvist teams up with the brilliant, damaged hacker Lisbeth Salander to investigate a 40-year-old disappearance from a wealthy Swedish family — and uncovers something far darker. Larsson's novel launched the Millennium series and introduced one of the most compelling anti-heroines in crime fiction.
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19
The Silence of the Lambs
A young FBI trainee bargains with a brilliant killer to catch another; a flawless, terrifying thriller.
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20
The Corrections
The three grown children of Alfred and Enid Lambert return home for a final Christmas as Alfred's Parkinson's progresses and Enid refuses to accept what is happening to her marriage and family. Franzen's National Book Award-winning novel moves between the Lambert children's separate American lives and their parents' Midwestern home in a portrait of family, decline and the late-20th-century United States.