Dr. Seuss - Green Eggs and Ham (1960)

This is on my Best 100 list of children's books to read.

Anyone who has a little brother (or sister) will immediately recognise Sam-I-Am's pestering ways and know that until you give in the torment never ends!  I really enjoyed the rhyming and repetitive nature of the storyline. It would make it easy to read, yet feel like you'd achieved something great (considering how long the book is) if you were a child. I enjoyed it as an adult.

Yet, no amount of pestering would ever get me to try green eggs and ham, particularly after they'd been waved under the funnel of a steam train and dipped in the ocean. Yuck! The pictures are interesting, but it's the words that make the book. They stay in your head like a song-and-dance act, jiggling around all happy and bright. That's the best thing words can ever do.

Maurice Sendak - Where the Wild Things Are (1963)

This is on my Best 100 list of children's books to read.

I never read it as a child and that's just sad because it is so much fun! I want to dress in a wolf suit and sail away to a magical island forest with lots of impossible creatures who make me Queen!!! I've always wanted to be an autocrat and have a wild rumpus, making lots of noise and mayhem.

The pictures are beautiful. My favourite is when his room has been transformed - "his ceiling hung with vines and the walls became the world all around...".

The book teaches imagination and how you can have fun, even when you're alone - well, until you get hungry.

Jean Estoril - Drina Ballerina (1991)

Jean Estoril is the pseudonym for one of the great children's author's Mabel Esther Allan. Over her life she wrote 130 children's books and was heavily influenced by the early 1920/30s authors Oxenham and Brent-Dyer. Drina Ballerina is the final book in her Drina series, begun in 1957. The series follows the life of Andrina Adamo, an orphan of the prima ballerina Elizabeth Ivory, who is raised in England by her grandparents. They always felt that dancing led to their daughter's death and were horrified when Drina announced that she wanted to dance, so they did everything they could to dissuade her from the career before finally realising it's meant to be and allowing Drina to study ballet.

This book reads like it was written in the 1960s, but was edited to make it more up to date with the period it was published in. Personally I think they ruined it and should have left it alone. Estoril wrote her books in a gentle manner without the usual teen angst that's been building over the last century. They were meant to be a comforting haven for children to go to, not threaded with bursts of unexplainable anger and nastiness that have no bearing on the actual story and make parts of the book look like an orange in a bowl of bananas.

Still, you can see Estoril's original story under the tripe and it rounds off the series beautifully as Drina joins the Dominick Company and begins the life of a ballerina. The series is beautiful and worth reading to a child. I'm sad to come to the end, but happy to finally see Drina all grown up and living her dream.