Three Children’s Books That Build Character and Virtue

Clear Facts

• Three classic and newly published children’s books are available for parents seeking wholesome reading material grounded in traditional values.
• These selections focus on poetry, virtue, history, and adventure without modern ideological overlays.
• Parents report success using these books in homeschooling settings for early readers and read-aloud sessions.

Parents searching for children’s books that reinforce traditional values and strong storytelling have solid options available right now. The old favorites still deliver, and new publishers are bringing back the best of what worked for earlier generations.

“Kingdom of Verse: A Children’s Introduction to English Language Poetry and Rhyme” by Owen Cyclops

Just go buy it. Owen Cyclops’s “Kingdom of Verse” is the most beautiful children’s book you’ll see all year. A devout Christian fascinated by the history of American religion (especially the weird parts), Owen Cyclops has built a name for himself online over the years with offbeat comics, beautiful icons and T-shirt designs, and some genuinely jaw-dropping religious art in the form of a Catholic religious calendar and an illustrated poster of Thomas Aquinas’s “Summa Theologica.” His combination of delicate lines, careful abstraction, and bold color is as if New Yorker cartoons were done in stained glass. He should be making bank as a magazine cover artist.

“Kingdom of Verse” is a collection of 72 verses and selections of verses, ranging from folk rhymes to Sara Teasdale. The choices of poems are excellent, and each page is delightfully designed and illustrated in clear, vivid color. A staggering number of the pages are good enough to stand on their own as prints. You turn the page to one of those and just sit there for a moment, thinking, “Oh.” The illustrator delights with everything from his frogs (gracing Hailaire Belloc “The Frog” and Emily Dickinson’s “I’m Nobody! Who are you?”) to his landscapes (Thomas Edward Brown’s “My Garden” and an extract of Lord Byron’s “Solitude”) to his surreal psychological scenes (Edgar Allan Poe’s “El Dorado”). He is perhaps at his most beautiful effect marrying word and thought in his portrait of the reader of A.A. Milne’s picture book. Really, just go get it; you’ll be glad you did.

“Heroes and Wonders” and “Warriors and Giants,” Chapter House Books

Homeschooling, long a favorite with the Right, has become much more broadly popular in the face of schools’ increasing failure to train students in even basic subjects such as reading and math. As a homeschooling dad of a five-year-old, I know homeschoolers are always on the hunt for materials. Chapter House graciously sent me review copies of the first two of the four three-volume collections in its chapter box sets. These are republications of classic books designed by previous generations to inculcate virtue and love of story in children. Chapter House recommends Volume I for kindergarten through second grade, and Volume II for second through fourth.

Volume I, “Heroes and Wonders,” contains Aesop’s Fables collected by J.B. Stickney, “A Child’s Book of Myths and Enchantment Tales” (originally published as two books, here as one volume), Greek myths collected and adapted by M.E. Price, and “Fifty Famous Stories Retold” by James Baldwin (no, the other one). The latter work recounts stories about historical figures of renown ranging from King Canute to Dick Whittington.

Volume II, “Warriors and Giants,” contains “Stories of Beowulf,” a Beowulf adaptation by H.E. Marshall; “In the Days of Giants,” a Norse myths collection by Abbie Brown; and “On the Shores of the Great Sea” by M.B. Synge, which begins with several biblical tales and goes on to Greek and Roman history. All are illustrated to varying degrees, ranging from a few new commissioned illustrations to restorations of the original edition’s art. Each volume is handsomely bound in cloth over board with attractive endpapers. The stories themselves are all time-tested by previous generations of children, and Chapter House provides some teaching guides that are slight but may be useful to some parents.

But do they work? To find out, I tested “Heroes and Wonders” on my homeschooled five-year-old. He’s a bright kid who reads well and has a great memory, but when teaching young children, you quickly learn that a general idea of skill level doesn’t mean the same thing for every kid. Can they handle the vocabulary? Can their phonics skills handle decoding it? Can their attention span handle the story length? For us, the last is what usually cracks first. Chapter House’s teaching recommends one story from each volume per day; I found that too much material for a younger kid, so I alternated between a pairing of a fable from Aesop and one of Baldwin’s fifty famous stories on one day and a (usually lengthier) story from “Myths and Enchantment Tales” the next, sometimes breaking it into two days’ reading if it was quite long. This worked well for us, and as we went along, I noticed my son was finding the well-retold myths engaging enough that he would push through even some longer stories in one go.

At the same time, these wouldn’t be the first or only books I would use for kindergarten reading practice. After learning to read (just buy “Teach Your Child to Read in 100 Easy Lessons” — it works), my son went through a year-plus of McGuffey’s readers, our own collections, and library books before tackling Chapter House’s offerings. But if your child isn’t ready to read these as part of school, they’re great for you to read aloud.

All in all, these reprints are excellent and well worth adding to your homeschooling shelf. They’re sturdy and beautiful enough to pass down to other family or a future generation.

“The Hardy Boys: The Tower Treasure” by Franklin W. Dixon

It’s hard to believe anyone’s unfamiliar with the Hardy Boys, whose adventures have run more than 200 books and no less than five television series, but just in case: Frank and Joe Hardy, ambitious teenage sons of a private detective, strike out into detecting with their father and on their own, facing mystery, peril, and many, many secret doors. In “The Tower Treasure,” the historic home of wealthy blue bloods is robbed of a vast sum in jewels and bonds ($40,000 in 1927 dollars, over three-quarters of a million today), and their suspicion falls on the caretaker who happens to be Frank and Joe’s classmate’s father. The investigation derails the suspect’s life, rendering him unemployable, and Frank and Joe’s classmate has to leave school and put aside his dreams of college in order to work and support the family. To undo the injustice and save the impoverished family, Frank and Joe set out to find the real culprit and prove their classmate’s father innocent.

I’d read the book before, but not like this. “The Tower Treasure” is the first in a series of (so far) six reprints by Passage Classics of the original texts of Frank and Joe’s adventures, which were subjected over the years to substantial editorial revisions by the holders of the original rights. I was one of the millions of American boys who grew up reading those revised editions, so reading the Passage Classics reprint was an interesting experience. The original is considerably more zippy and fun. The dialogue is snappier, the characters better characterized, the scenes and settings more evocative. Much has been made of the edits for 1927’s racial elements, including slurs (though by no means limited to them; at one point the boys evoke in an Italian immigrant a terror of the Black Hand), but the overwhelming motivation was the passage of time. “The Tower Treasure” is a thoroughly 1927 book in which even young people speak fairly formally, the automobile still feels like an exciting new technology, and faking a bomb scare doesn’t merit serious investigation. The people who owned the Hardy Boys before reversion to public domain didn’t think that would relate for the audience of decades later, let alone a century.

And to be fair, they weren’t wrong. There were hordes of boys having adventures in early 20th-century fiction. Most of them are wholly forgotten now. It’s Frank and Joe Hardy, who survived, however bowdlerized, updated, and somewhat neutered, who are well-known enough for Passage Classics to republish the better-written versions of their adventures for an audience who can enjoy them for what they are. The books are fine reading for young people who are open to visiting a different era, and Passage has done a great job putting together the books as individual volumes and as box sets; they’re handsomely bound, with striking cover and frontispiece illustrations by Alex Wisner, and will look great on any kid’s bookshelf.

Let us know what you think, please share your thoughts in the comments below.