Books like William Pène du Bois

Merrill shares William Pène du Bois’s gift for treating splendid nonsense as sober historical fact. Her account of a conflict between New York’s pushcart vendors and its bullying trucks comes furnished with official testimony, strategic terminology, ingenious homemade weapons, and Ronni Solbert’s mock-documentary illustrations.

Beneath the comedy is the same faith in clever, civilized people solving enormous problems with modest tools. A cult children’s classic since 1964, it is brisk, sly, and so persuasively reported that its absurd war begins to feel like neglected American history.

If Professor Sherman’s manners and the elaborate society of Krakatoa delighted you, meet Miss Bianca: a pampered embassy mouse recruited by the Prisoners’ Aid Society for a perilous mission. Sharp creates a miniature civilization of committees, etiquette, diplomacy, and heroic obligations, then lets courage emerge from the most refined and apparently unsuitable character in it.

Garth Williams’s illustrations complement prose that is elegant, dry, and genuinely exciting. The novel inspired a long-loved series—and is subtler, stranger, and more sophisticated than its famous Disney descendant. Miss Bianca is one of children’s literature’s irresistible creations.

A mysterious tollbooth arrives in bored Milo’s room, complete with map and instructions, and opens onto a world constructed with the satisfying exactness of one of du Bois’s diagrams. Here words, numbers, idioms, and logical errors become roads, cities, hazards, and inhabitants; every joke also reveals how thought itself works.

Juster’s perfectly controlled absurdity and Jules Feiffer’s energetic drawings made this a modern classic, but its reputation can obscure how exhilarating it is sentence by sentence. Like The Twenty-One Balloons, it gives children the rare luxury of a fantasy that assumes curiosity, wit, and intelligence are adventures in their own right.