Appendix K - Kids Books I Like

07 Sep, 2025

It's that time of year again, where bloggers across the world pick up their pencils and bend them to the task of a bandwagon.

At Marcia's urging, the theme this time is Appendix x***. The *x is supposed to stand for your own name, but as I've mentioned before, I don't have the luxury of a great deal of reading now. I do have the opportunity (and excuse) to familiarise myself with some children's literature, so we're forging ahead with **Appendix K - Kids Books.

I'm looking forward to my kids growing up a bit so I can start them on Tintin, Around the World in 80 Days, Enid Blyton - and who knows what other problematic favourites, which have percolated down the generations. At this point though, they're smaller, and so I'm reading smaller books.

Still, though, there's no shortage of worthwhile literature in the sphere. Just see Meguey Baker's wonderful chat with Thomas Manuel on the Yes Indie'd podcast. Or check out my previous post on Guess How Much I Love You. Or read on.

Maurice Sendak

is a bit of an obvious pull, but he's got to go in here. I love his work for its dreaminess, its ability to transport the reader. More than that, there's a respect that he offers young children by presenting worlds that are unknowable, situations that are perilous, perhaps only just in control, and protagonists who feel real because they are complicated, fallible, subject to their emotions and impulses.

Joy Cowley

gets a special shoutout for her Hungry Giant, who wields the namesake of this blog.

When The Moon Was Blue is one of the fondest books I remember from my own childhood. To be honest, I don't know that it's a great book, just a good one. But I think of this page all the time.

[Moon Was Blue image]

Growing up, I was enamoured with the fantasy of walking up walls and ceilings. Anytime I was daydreaming, there was a good chance I was scoping out routes across the ceiling of whatever room I was in. Like any good magic item, it recontextualises the world around you. When I write magic items, I always go back to this - the more open-ended, the better - that's where daydreams live.

Cowley also has this page of very solid writing advice.

Jon Klassen

is an author who walks an extremely fine line. His writing is fun for adults and children to read - it's a balance that I've seen mishandled a thousand times. He doesn't lean on innuendo and double entendre (a real ick for me in kids lit). It works because of the quality of the writing, the snappiness and voiciness of the narration, the easy characterisation of everyone you meet. I Want My Hat Back also has a little capsule murder mystery tucked into it, for kids who are a bit perceptive.

Klassen's characters are an inspiration for writing NPCs - they almost give you their vocalisation on a plate, and adhere to some of the best NPC writing advice around.

John Burningham

Another author who achieves a dreamy quality in his writing. There's something so matter-of-fact about the presentation of his dreamlands. They have legitimacy because the characters involved engage with them in such a straightforward manner.

The fantastical in Burningham books is only available to children, I think because they are willing to take it at face value.

That sort of naive engagement with the world-as-presented is the perfect frame of mind for players. Try to get them there and keep them there with whatever tools at your disposal. In both It's a Secret and Time to Get Out of the Bath, Shirley, Burningham moves his characters swiftly to where the action is and leans heavily on his expressionistic art to sell the mood.

Taro Gomi

There's a freshness and lightness to Gomi's illustration that immediately gets me in a good kids-book reading mood, and this tone carries through to his writing. Everybody Poops is a favourite in our house. It's full of good gags, and it's a poo-book that somehow avoids being too gross.

But the book that gets the most love in our house is My Friends. Like a lot of kids books, it's rhythmic, using the same frame for every spread. I actually think this is a good structure for younger children. Like the old adage that you enjoy watching a film more a second time because you don't have to follow the plot, the strong repetition allows the reader to focus on other aspects of the reading experience. Most of the time, this is great for kids and less good for the adult reading it to them—reading a generic barnyard book for the thousandth time is a huge drag. But Gomi is astute enough to break up the repetition with unexpected and charming encounters - nothing so crazy as to break the tone or pattern, but enough to sustain interest for far more readthroughs than you'd otherwise expect.

In games as in literature, rhythm and repetition are strong structures that provide interesting opportunities—but they have to be used thoughtfully or risk becoming boring.

Eric Carle

There's an elephant in the room and it's not Elmer. Speaking of rhythm, I need to mention the very clever section at the heart of The Very Hungry Caterpillar. You're probably familiar with it already.

On Monday he ate through one apple. On Tuesday he ate through two pears. On Wednesday he ate through three plums. On Thursday he ate through four strawberries. On Friday he ate through five oranges.

At the back of your mind when you're reading to your kid, you're often thinking pedagogically: what's my kid getting from this? This section has familiar structures - the nouns for various fruit, the days of the week, the numbers one to five (presented in discrete countable units). All of this stands to be learnt, which is all to the good.

But the real genius is in the layout, in gimmicks that are only really seen in kids books - hole punches, and oddly-shaped pages. The series of fruits have holes running through them (diegetically the work of the caterpillar munching through), and these five pages are stacked so you can get an overview of the whole section from the outset. These two devices reinforce one another to link the section together and to lay bare its structure in a way that is comprehensible to a child. The book teaches you how to read it. It's metatextuality that a one-year-old can get, because it's physically present in the book.

And then you turn the page to Saturday, and are presented with a crescendo, a visual feast in Eric Carle's signature colour collages. It's a fun page for a kid, filled with treats of every sort. Finally, one more page turn brings the hole-punch section through to Sunday, where the caterpillar has learnt a lesson and returned to a state of nature. A coda that also brings the cycle of a week to a fitting end.

Clever stuff that uses number, rhythm, colour, and several innovative layout techniques to build a thematically coherent section in the centre of the book. It's a multigenerational classic for a reason.

Lessons here for game designers? Think of your work as a whole. Whether depicting spaces or setting out rules, decide on formal structures you can layer to make the text coherent with itself.

Lucy Cousins

I'm a millenial, so I suppose I should be turning my nose up at the commercial success of Lucy Cousins, but I just can't bring myself to do it. She's too good.

In fact, despite Hooray for Fish receiving multiple encore performances (and kisses, straight on the book) just tonight, what I want to talk about is the smash-hit Maisy series.

Besides Cousins' art, which is charming, clear and expressive, I think Maisy is such a success because Maisy Mouse is emotionally a child, but practically an adult. It's a strange position to be in. She's able to go to the shops, cook, clean her house, go to the dentist. There's no 'adult' in her life who does things for her. But she has the same concerns that a child might have, has to work through the same anxieties, eats kid-friendly food, goes to bed with her toy panda at 7 o'clock, etc. She's whatever a child might play-act, a cipher for a young reader. She is completely relatable, but has agency in a wider world.

What I'm saying is that Maisy Mouse is the model PC. When we structure rules and scenarios for players to engage with, this is a good frame of mind to be in. How do we maximise agency, while keeping the character's immediate world relatable?

Pamela Allen

God she's good. I will never get enough of seeing a house by a lake, tucked in a valley. It turns up in book after book. Truly inspirational to have a motif like that.

There's a lot I could say about Pamela Allen, but what I really want to do is show off this incredible double-page spread in the middle of a book for two year olds. I didn't expect to turn the page to this, and when I did I just laughed and laughed.

No lesson, I'm just inspired by someone who is clearly having a good time with their craft.

Right, well that's it - out of time. I'll leave off with a few of the favourite pictures from the kids books I have to hand.

I wish RPG stuff could look this good. Huge, generous layouts slathered in artwork and colour. Tricky hatches, holes, flaps and foldouts. Transparencies, shimmery bits, mirrors. Even the dinkiest kids book that sells for five bucks can afford these tricks. Ah well. That's another post.