An Essential Reading List for Growing Up From Rebecca Stead, Author of The List of Things That Will Not Change

All of my books have families in them, but The List of Things That Will Not Change is my first book about family.
Bea, whose story it is, has two pretty wonderful, divorced parents, her dad’s amazing boyfriend, and a deep longing for a sister. Her parents have promised to always live near one another so that she can walk from one apartment to the other — she goes back and forth every other day. Monday is a dad day, Tuesday is a mom day, and so on.
This is also the way I grew up, in the 1970s and ’80s. I wasn’t the only kid in my class with divorced parents, but I didn’t know anyone else who did what I did, and so I was a noticer. I paid a lot of attention to the way other families operated, not because I wanted mine to be just like them, but because I was sensitive to the fact that families come in different forms. And I was also, like Bea, sensitive in general.
[caption id="attachment_54195" align="alignright" width="175"] ©JoanneDugan[/caption]
My stories all come from my memories of being a kid. This includes my memory of the reading I did as a kid. For a while, maybe from ages eight to eleven or twelve, reading stories was the way I came to know myself. In books, I slipped into the minds of fictional characters and found my own curiosity, joy, frustration, yearning, envy, and so on. A “good” book meant real characters, not idealized ones. Good books brought me not only truth about the world but also moments of self-recognition. Truth about myself.
Not surprisingly, I have been attracted to stories about families since my beloved Bread and Jam for Frances, which is the first book I can remember reading myself from cover to cover. Here are a few other books from “back then” that exerted an extra-strong force upon me, first as a kid reader, and later as a writer. I just noticed that three of them take place in New York City, and the fourth is set on Mars:

Harriet the Spy by Louise Fitzhugh: My first jolt of what felt like an “unfiltered” fictional childhood. Loss, love, struggle, and loneliness. All of it made me feel seen, and therefore less lonely myself.
Red Planet by Robert Heinlein: I was thrilled by the world-building science of this Mars colony adventure until the story took me deeper, to an exploration of what it means to make assumptions about a native culture that is beyond your experience and understanding. I have never stopped thinking about it.
Daddy Was a Number Runner by Louise Meriwether: I read and reread this story of a 1930s girlhood in Harlem. It allowed me to discover a world I didn’t know, while at the same time recognizing the most intimate parts of myself.
All-of-a-Kind by Sydney Taylor: This historical novel about a Jewish family on New York City’s Lower East Side felt closer to fantasy for me. Five siblings! Bliss. Full of details and moments to savor.

And here are some newer favorite middle-grade books about family. What distinguishes each of them, I think, is a demonstrated respect for the complex emotional territory of family life, and for the power of children.
One Crazy Summer by Rita Williams-Garcia
Saffy’s Angel by Hilary McKay
Merci Suárez Changes Gears by Meg Medina
This One Summer by Mariko and Jillian Tamaki
Some Places More than Others by Renée Watson
Arcady’s Goal by Eugene Yelchin