Part of me hopes it will be a girl: I can share all my Betsy-Tacy books with her! But now I know that if it’s a boy, I can share my Betsy-Tacy books with him, too. I don’t know the gender of my grandchild yet. My older son is now about to become a father. Boys benefit from coming to know a wide selection of girls encountered in the intimate, safe space created within the pages of a book. I’ve become convinced that it’s a good thing for boys to read about girls, even though popular wisdom says that boys are much more reluctant to read about girls than vice versa. But because of me, my boys know about Betsy Ray, Posy Fossil, Sara Crewe, Mary Lennox, Anne Shirley, Polly Pepper, Rebecca Rowena Randall, Jane Moffat, Laura Ingalls, Pollyanna Whittier, and Heidi. Of course, as my boys became independent readers they found their way to books that they devoured on their own: Harry Potter, Holes, Captain Underpants, The Time Warp Trio. Instead, I spent the next fifteen years reading all those girl books to my boys, one after the other, some of them over and over and over again. Perhaps I should have taken his birth as an opportunity to branch out and discover the classics of boyhood.

I held my newborn son in my arms and gazed sadly at the bookshelves lining the living room, stuffed full of stories about girls so dear to my heart, stories I so wanted to share with this new little person who had come into my life, who happened to be a boy. Then I became the mother of boys: Christopher, now about to turn 25, and Gregory, now about to turn 21. I looked forward to having daughters of my own with whom I could share the beloved texts from our childhood, chief among them the Betsy-Tacy books of Maud Hart Lovelace, the “Shoes” books of Noel Streatfeild, A Little Princess, The Secret Garden, Anne of Green Gables, and other classic girls’ stories.

Fortunately for me, her husband became a bookstore owner, so every Christmas I open packages under the tree to find childhood favorites that nobody on earth but my sister would know that I wanted: teen romances from a bygone era like Double Date by Rosamond du Jardin and Jean and Johnny by Beverly Cleary. We spent most of our childhood doing nothing but reading, and we loved all the same books. I grew up reading with my one-year-younger sister, Cheryl. Mills shares a wonderful list of her family’s favorite books that feature girl protagonists-she encourages you to share them with both boys and girls, alike. Published: SeptemClaudia Mills, PhilosophyclaudiaĬlaudia Mills is the author of many chapter and middle-grade books, including 7 x 9=Trouble! How Oliver Olson Changed the World Kelsey Green, Reading Queen and, most recently, Zero Tolerance. She also teaches philosophy at the University of Colorado at Boulder.

The Witch Family by Eleanor Estes