Books like The Railway Children
A family draws closer around an empty chair; children turn worry into action, small errands into adventures, and the adult world becomes kinder because they have passed through it.
If you liked The Railway Children, you’ll love these
Not lookalikes — kindred books. Each one shares something essential with The Railway Children, and we tell you exactly what.
The closest companion to The Railway Children is Nesbit’s own story of the Bastable siblings, who respond to their family’s dwindling fortunes by launching a series of magnificently impractical schemes to restore them.
What makes it irresistible is the voice: affectionate, mischievous, and wonderfully alert to the gulf between children’s intentions and results. As in The Railway Children, financial anxiety is real but never allowed to flatten the children’s inventiveness or the book’s comedy. Its famously unreliable child narrator helped shape generations of children’s fiction; to miss the Bastables is to miss Nesbit at her funniest and most influential.
Eve Garnett gives the seven Ruggles children the same dignity Nesbit gives Roberta, Peter, and Phyllis: their mistakes matter, their good impulses have consequences, and ordinary family life is ample material for excitement.
The Ruggleses have little money, but Garnett neither sentimentalizes nor patronizes them. Haircuts, lost clothes, school outings, and household emergencies become vivid dramas because every child has a distinct temperament and every scrape tests the family’s loyalty. Winner of the Carnegie Medal, this warm, unsugared classic offers one of children’s literature’s most convincing portraits of happiness without prosperity.
Four sisters arrive at a summer cottage and promptly fill the neighboring estate with secret meetings, loyalties, quarrels, rescues, and plans that adults have failed to make. Birdsall understands, as Nesbit did, that children are not merely witnesses to family trouble: they improvise solutions, sometimes disastrously, and become braver through trying.
The pleasure lies in the sisters’ sharply different characters and in prose that feels timeless without becoming quaint. Beneath the comedy is the same emotional promise as The Railway Children—that generosity can alter another person’s fate. The first volume of a deeply beloved series and winner of the National Book Award for Young People’s Literature, it is a modern family classic with an old-fashioned largeness of heart.