Recommend me some child-oriented novels for research in making my own.

[Misterian]

Hi there, I've been lately working on a "KidLit" book that I'm titling Space Cat Coby, it's to be mainly the first of multiple novels the follows a Slice-Of-Life genre peppered with some science fiction elements.

The premise centers around Coby, an alien 7-year-old anthropomorphic cat child who found himself stranded on Earth after a meteor shower wrecked the spaceship he and his parents were on and his parents were forced to put him in an escape pod to save him.

Shortly after landing on Earth, Coby was found by a friendly human family who took a liking to him and took him in as an extraterrestrial foster child. From that point on, the story centers around Coby working to adjust to living a different and "lower-tech" life on Modern-Day Earth, helping others however he can, and learning valuable life lessons along the way.

Now the closest children's book I've read with a slightly similar premise is Maniac Magee, but does anyone else know of any other children's books with a premise much more similar the one I'm working on? something to help me get an idea of how I should write a children's novel?

 

[Trunkage]

What sort of age range are we talking about? I'm assuming 7?

Look, I spend my time reading books about fairies to my 6 year old daughter. That's the best I can do

 

[JoJo]

With Trunkage here, the first question is what sort of age range are you aiming for. If you haven't already, I would recommend looking up the market groups that modern publishers try to pitch towards. I'm not well acquainted with those aimed at very young children, but "middle grade" novels are generally aimed at 8 to 12 year olds, while "young adult" tends to be 13+. Of course, in practice, kids will often read up or down depending on their reading age and development.

 

[WhiteFangofWhoa]

Bringing up Maniac Magee suggests more of the 8 to 12 age range. I do have some suggestions, though they're all books I read at that age so they're all quite dated:

The 'My Teacher Is An Alien' series
The 'Rod Allbright and the Galactic Patrol' series
Anything written by Gordon Korman, though it's all comedy stuff, not sure how tongue in cheek you want this
Anything written by Judy Blume if you want something more down to earth and serious

I was also into Animorphs then but that series might be too gory and intense for that age range. Though I personally dislike this trend, Goosebumps sold well enough that apparently kids of that era really, really like it when you make the end of every single chapter a cliffhanger followed after by an anticlimax, no matter how forced it may be.

 

[Silentpony_v1legacy]

Bunicula. vampire bunny eats carrots.

 

[EvilRoy]

I'm with Whoa on Goosebumps, you could also look at the Petforce series that starred Garfield and friends becoming superheroes. You could also check out The Magic Treehouse, which I remember reading a lot of as a kid (but aside from remembering not knowing who the masked person is I can remember nothing, including who the masked person is.)

 

[Dreiko_v1legacy]

The Ranger series imo is the best for a kid around 10~. The author wrote them originally as a collection of bedtime stories he'd tell his son but he ended up publishing them and expanding his universe significantly.

Very fun world and they're good enough to enjoy if you're older too as long as you like fantasy novels so you may be getting yourself a present too. Story follows the life of a ranger apprentice (in the dnd class sense of the term) and his training and various adventures, nothing too groundbreaking but all the chars are very heartfull.


Just be prepared to get a bunch of em cause they're addictive as hell. There's 12 books in the main story (there's a spinoff about vikings too) and I read all 12 in the span of something like 3 weeks back a few years ago lol.

 

[Saint of M]

On the top of my head:

Narnia
Winnie the Poo
The Hobbit
Paddington Bear