Top 10+ best fantasy books for kids

Covers for Redwall, Willa of the Wood and Inkheart

In this harsh, painful world, the loss of childhood innocence is an inevitable fact of life. But why dash your children’s hopes with cold reality when you could do it with a delightful fantasy story instead? With these 10 best fantasy books for kids, your children are certain to learn of the world’s evils but in a fun, accessible way that they can understand and will prepare them for the coming changes in their lives.

A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L’Engle

(Ariel Books)

A Wrinkle In Time was doing tesseracts before Avengers made them cool. Madeleine L’Engle’s fantasy opus centers around a young girl named Meg Murry, who soon finds out her next-door neighbors are supernatural beings capable of transporting themselves across time and space with the help of a certain aforementioned hypercube. With the help of her neighbors, Meg travels across distant alien worlds in search of her long-lost father, who is trapped on a faraway planet controlled by a dark entity known as IT. Young Meg must traverse the dangerous planet where it maintains 1984-like control over its inhabitants and free her father (and the rest of the universe) from IT’s evil clutches. Written in 1962, the book is regarded as a classic of children’s fantasy and has traumatized little minds for decades. But don’t worry, good wins out in the end.

The Neverending Story by Michael Ende

(Thienemann Verlag)

German author Michael Ende’s The Neverending Story is a whimsical children’s tale that features one of the freakiest antagonists in all of fiction: the literal embodiment of emptiness and void. After the young Bastian busts into a bookstore to escape some bullies, he finds himself drawn to a mysterious book called The Neverending Story. After using the five-finger discount to claim it for himself, Bastian discovers that the fantasy within its pages is more real than he could ever imagine. After reading about the Empress of Fantastica and her battle against The Nothing—a shapeless entity made of pure despair—Bastian begins to discover that the story’s character’s are aware that he is reading about them, and that they need his help. A classic of the genre, The Neverending Story is one of the most famous (and famously weird) pieces of children’s literature ever penned.

Matilda by Roald Dahl

(New Windmills)

Before it became a classic ’90s movie, Matilda was a 1988 magical realism story from the mind of Roald Dahl. Matilda Wormwood has a gifted mind—she learned to speak by age one and read by age three. Oh, she’s fully telekinetic, too. Sadly for Matilda, her parents don’t appreciate their daughter’s gifts and send her away to a school ruled by the maniacal headmistress Agatha Trunchbull. While at school, Matilda uses her telekinetic powers to protect herself and her classmates from Trunchbull’s abuse and forms a mother/daughter relationship with the kindly teacher Miss Honey, who supports Matilda in her academic endeavors. While whimsical in tone, Matilda teaches the mature lesson that the world unfortunately doesn’t always value the intellectual talents of young women, but that young women should keep on seeking to better their minds anyway.

The Little Prince by Antoine De Saint-Exupéry

(Clarion Books)

Penned by French author Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Little Prince is the story of a young prince who goes on spacefaring adventures throughout the many planets in the universe. The Little Prince learns something different on each planet he visits and has to confront heavy ideas like love, loss, life, and death. The Prince has to free himself from a toxic relationship with a manipulative rose, bear witness to the lonely life of a king with no subjects, and contend with a snake that is the personification of death. In short, the Prince goes through a lot for someone so little and learns the beautiful and melancholy truths of existence in ways that children can understand.

Redwall by Brian Jacques

(Philomel)

Brian Jacques’s Redwall is The Lord of the Rings meets Animal Farm. The tale takes place in a medieval kingdom populated by anthropomorphic animals, where a young mouse named Matthias lives in the abbey of Redwall with other peace-loving mice. That peace is threatened by an evil rat warlord named Cluny the Scourge and his rodent horde, and to defeat the rodent and return peace to the land, Matthias goes on a quest to find the mythical sword of the hero Martin the Warrior. Cluny’s bad, sure, but this series’ most devious villain is a fox named Slagar the Cruel, who hides his disfigured face behind a checkered kerchief and enslaves animals into his mercenary band. Redwall might seem like a bunch of cute books about talking animals, but characters get bodied in this series—and with a greater sense of danger comes a greater sense of triumph when good prevails.

The Jumbies by Tracey Baptiste

(Little, Brown Books for Young Readers)

Inspired by Caribbean folklore, Tracey Baptiste’s The Jumbies is a children’s horror tale that gives Goosebumps a run for its money. The young Corinne La Mer grew up with stories of the Jumbies, shadowy island spirits that are said to haunt people during the night. Corinne knows that Jumbies are just a fairytale, boogeymen that parents use to scare kids, until a pair of creepy yellow eyes in the dark forest show her otherwise. After a beautiful stranger named Severine appears in town, Corinne begins to suspect that Severine might be a jumbie taking human form. Using her nascent magical powers, Corinne and her friends have to thwart a jumbie plot to take over the island or be claimed by the forces of darkness forevermore.

City of Ghosts by Victoria Schwab

(Scholastic)

Victoria Schwab’s City of Ghosts is the story of Cass, a little kid who (like many before her) sees dead people. As a child, Cass nearly drowned, and ever since her brush with death, she’s been able to glimpse the world beyond. To talk to the deceased, Cass pulls back the Veil that serves as the border between life and the afterlife and uses her abilities to solve the spiritual mysteries that plague her home of Edinburgh, Scotland. Accompanied by her ghost best friend, Cass braves graveyards, castles, and catacombs to free her home from a sinister spectral presence that doesn’t belong in the world yet haunts it anyway.

Inkheart by Cornelia Funke

(Scholastic)

Written by German author Cornelia Funke, Inkheart is the story of a young girl’s quest to destroy an ancient evil that emerged from the pages of a book. Meggie’s father Mo has the magical ability to turn fiction into fact and can transport characters from storybooks into the human world. Mo should have been more considerate of his reading material, as he accidentally unleashed the maniacal ruler Capricorn from the pages of a book called Inkheart into the family’s living room. Things only get more complicated when Capricorn starts summoning monsters of his own into the human world, and Meggie must use her budding magical powers to stop the despot from claiming total control.

Willa of the Wood by Robert Beatty

(Disney-Hyperion)

Set in turn-of-the-20th-century Appalachia, Robert Beatty’s Willa of the Wood tells the story of a young night spirit named Willa, taught by her faerie-like family to fear the “day folk” (i.e., humans) who chop down their forests. While Willa initially mistrusts humans, she begins questioning her clan’s ways after seeing their outright hostility and cruelty towards them. After meeting a kindly human, Willa decides to smooth things over between humans and night spirits, even if she must battle against her kin. Willa of the Wood’s best lesson for children? Question authority. In this world, you have to do what’s right, even if it goes against doing what you’re told.

How to Train Your Dragon by Cressida Cowell

(Little, Brown Books for Young Readers)

Thankfully, nothing all too horrifying happens in How to Train Your Dragon—unless you want to count the horrible dragon named Green Death and its plan to murder all of Viking-kind after its inevitable awakening from slumber. Cressida Cowell’s How to Train Your Dragon is a charming fantasy series about a young Viking named Hiccup and his beloved dragon, Toothless, whom the fledgling hero tamed and trained at a young age. Toothless and Hiccup have to use their pluck and tenacity to save both the human and the dragon world from terrifying elder fire-breathers who will turn the world to ash.

Want to soften the “kill all humans” blow for your kiddos? Let them listen to the audiobook narrated by the delightful David Tennant, who will describe the battle with trademark whimsy and charm! If your kids can handle that, show them the Dreamworks movie adaptation, too—it’s the best thing the studio has done since Shrek 2.