Books like Peter Brown

Ivan, a gorilla living in a shopping-mall enclosure, narrates in short, lucid observations that make every joke and heartbreak land cleanly. Like Roz, he begins as an acute observer of creatures around him, then discovers that caring for others may require courage and action.

Winner of the Newbery Medal and now a modern children’s classic, this is a rare novel whose simplicity deepens its moral force. Its friendships among animals are funny, distinctive, and unsentimental; by the end, Ivan’s quiet voice feels unforgettable.

Johannes is a free-running dog who serves as the “Eyes” of an urban park, gathering information from its animal inhabitants. His exuberant narration turns looking, running, and smelling into sources of astonishment—and gradually reveals that a functioning community depends upon many different talents.

The 2024 Newbery Medal winner shares The Wild Robot’s delight in seeing a landscape through nonhuman eyes, but it has a comic, headlong personality all its own. Beneath the adventure is a profound question: is freedom something you possess alone, or something others help make possible? Johannes’s answer is glorious.

Edward is an exquisitely made china rabbit—and, at first, spectacularly vain. Though he cannot move or speak aloud, his encounters with people slowly enlarge his capacity to understand them. Readers who loved watching Roz become more than her programming will recognize the beauty of that inward transformation.

DiCamillo writes with the clarity and gravity of a timeless fable, never protecting Edward—or the reader—from sorrow. Yet the novel’s devoted following comes from its conviction that vulnerability is not weakness: to love is to become breakable, and to become breakable is to become fully alive.