Grow Up! 9 Adult Versions of Favorite Childhood Books

The Phantom Tollbooth is definitely one of my personal childhood faves. As someone who loves both words and numbers (we exist!), the book tickled me. It’s a story of a boy who breaks out of boredom by discovering the joy of knowledge. Full of whimsy and wordplay, it’s a book that teaches some lessons without feeling too preachy. Grownup fans of wordplay are sure to love Ella Minnow Pea. This book follows Ella as she fights back against a totalitarian government banning letters of the alphabet one by one. The text itself reflects this creeping censorship as the writing becomes more and more constrained. With freedom of expression under threat as it currently is, this book is more timely than ever.

Sideways Stories from Wayside School is unforgettable for its absurdity. So many hilarious things happen at the 30-story-tall school with classrooms stacked to the sky. Justice for Todd! If you love books with interconnected stories, and you’re looking for another set in a towering construction, try Tower! Beanstalk is a ​​674-story skyscraper and sovereign nation. The stories set there are as witty, surprising, and satirical as its childhood read-alike.

The plot twist in Miss Nelson is Missing! is one for the ages. I thought I’d encountering it during a Reading Rainbow episode, but apparently that was its sequel, Miss Nelson is Back. Anyway, I don’t want to spoil anything. But if you loved that twist ending, you’ll enjoy (not sure that’s the right word!) Never Let Me Go. Like its counterpart, Never Let Me Go has a school setting and a plot in which students discover the truth about their reality.

The Monster At the End of this Book is baby’s first metafiction, right? It’s also a great introduction to horror, in that gathering sense of dread Grover experiences. Chasing the Boogeyman is the perfect book for the grown-up lover of high-concept horror. In it, a writer begins to document a local serial killer terrorizing his small town. As he writes, the line between fiction and reality becomes very blurred. You might even find yourself googling to untangle fact from fiction for yourself.

Look, if you loved the Frog and Toad books as a kid, you need to be reading grumpy/sunshine gay romance books as an adult. I don’t make the rules. Cat Sebastian’s catalog contains many such gems, but I’ll single out It Takes Two to Tumble. It’s a historical romance retelling of The Sound of Music pairing a sunny vicar with a grumpy sea captain whose children need tending. Vibes for days. Pining for years. I honestly couldn’t be prouder of this match-up.

So the Little House books have not aged well, to say the absolute least, and you ought to read Prairie Fires if you’d like to know more. So I deeply appreciate authors who are trying to write into a similar imaginative space. Some of the most memorable moments in the original come when the family is in real peril. Think of the long winter, or the plague of locusts! Readers who also appreciated those moments will love Lone Women, the story of Adelaide Henry. She’s headed to Montana to claim her homestead, and the dangers she faces are waaaaay scarier than locusts and snow.

I don’t want to hear any hack jokes about how bad Turkish delight is. I think it’s delicious and maybe I would sell out my family for it. Anyway, The Chronicles of Narnia is a portal fantasy/Christian allegory following four ordinary children and their extraordinary adventures in a magical land. This series created fantasy readers out of so many of us. Comparing it to Piranesi may be cheating just a little bit, because the book specifically references the Narnia books. Just look at the cover. Still, adult readers who are interested in fantasy novels that tackle big questions about religion are sure to enjoy this slim novel packing incredible depth. It’s a book many people think is best to read without a lot of background, so suffice it to say it’s about a house with infinite rooms, and what its inhabitants discover there.