Our Favorite Writers Share Their Favorite Childhood Books
Austin Ratner, author of IN the LAND of the LIVING
Arnold Lobel’s Owl at Home is a perfect children’s book. The first story in it has Owl welcoming the Winter into his house only to find that Winter is a terrible houseguest, blowing his drapes around and dumping snow in his fireplace and freezing his soup. That Owl naively expected better, more humane behavior from Winter is supremely comic, but the story contains great pathos in it, too. What’s so hard about being a kid—and a grown-up—is that you’re constantly having to lay aside your assumptions that the world is a congenial, human place, and what’s so great about this book is that it cheers you on your way to dealing with the indifference around you; Owl shows you how to make a separate peace with life and helps you laugh about the whole dilemma too.