Marjanah

OOh, children's and young adult books...I still have some of mine and I still take them out of the library...and give them as gifts.

I loved Phoebe Gilman's books, like Jillian Jiggs (I made a couple of those pigs) and The Balloon Tree, The GYpsy Princess and Something from Nothing. And I also read Robert Munsch and the Berenstain Bears.

I got into so many of the series Babysitter's Club, Sweet Valley Twins/High (did anyone else read the two "family saga" novels???...they were very dramatic). I loved Kit Pearson too...and I think I read one of The Gymnasts novels...one where the mother of one of the characters was having a baby.

I then got caught up in The Star Wars novels and branched out into other sci-fi from there. I still grab anything written by Janet McNaughton, and Robin McKinley in particular, they write beautifully

~Unfaithful~

^ The SVH sagas made me bawl like a baby, I read them until they were in tatters

Marjanah

Yeah they were sad...every time it seemed like people were happy, someone would tragically die. But I enjoyed the way the families interacted over the generations.

I also really loved the Christmas book where Jessica and Elizabeth get those two Harlequin dolls and then are magically transported to that fantasy world. There was a lot going on it that book.

Frozeninside

I still enjoy reading children and YA literature.

sunnykerr

I've been reading Louisa May Alcott's Eight Cousins and Rose in Bloom. And I can't get over it. I don't know if it's because my other "kid lit" books (Anne of Green Gables, Little Women, Little Princess, Secret Garden, Harry Potter, Heidi, Lemony Snicket...) have all been turned into movies but I keep just sort of really seeing the characters. I keep expecting them to have a face and to have them appear somewhere.

I mean, I am so ready to "fall in love" (not in a psychotic way obviously) with Mac and Uncle Alec and Rose and Aunt Plenty.... And I keep having to remind myself that these books were never turned into a movie or a series... Shame, really.

Frozeninside

It's funny at least 3 of the books you have mentioned are among my list of my favorite pieces of literature.

AdriaMichelle

I took Children's Lit at my college and I loved it. I have always loved Children's Lit though. The stories are a lot fun to read and brings out my inner child. So many wonderful books to choose from.

LisG

I still love to read childrens lit..some of my favs have already been mentioned though. I loved the sweet valley (especially the junior high books), the babysitters club, a series of unfortunate events, nancy drew, theres probably heaps more too that dont come to mind yet.

-Kelly-

I'm planning to read the "Anne of green gables" books after I finished reading the HP books

~Unfaithful~

I want to re-read the Anne series to, it's been quite a few years.

~*Echo*~

Mmhm, I loved those sagas. There are actually four of them total: one for Lila Fowler's family, one for Bruce Patman's family (how'd that happen?), and two for the Wakefield family, one for their mom's side of the family and one for their dad's. I still have all four of them, and I re-read them a couple years ago just to see how they held up. They seem pretty cheesy and cliched now, but they're still fun. My favorite was always the Lila/Fowler family one; the early generations when they still lived in France were great in a cheesy historical drama kind of way.

I have tons of fond memories of kids lit. The Sweet Valley books were probably my favorite: I was in some sort of book club that sent me about four Sweet Valley Twins books a month when I was a kid, and I devoured them like crazy. Unfortunately, I packed them up a while back and I think I might have given them away. Weirdly, I never got into the actual Sweet Valley High books themselves very much. I read more from the Sweet Valley Twins ones when I was a kid and Sweet Valley University ones when I got a bit older. However, I still remember one series of SVH special editions that I read once that stuck with me. It was three or four books, and it was kind of a horror miniseries where the twins went to babysit some kids in this house and weird, scary stuff kept happening to them there so that they eventually refused to go to sleep inside the house because horrible stuff happened in their dreams that would then happen in real life. Does anyone else remember those? Man, those books gave me nightmares.

I liked other series too, especially The Babysitters Club and R.L. Stine's Goosebumps and Fear Street series. And there was a sub-series of the Babysitters Club books that I really liked, with the diaries of Dawn and her friends after she moved back to California. They all had pretty typical teenage issues: Sunny's mom had a terminal illness and she didn't get along with her dad, Maggie was an anorexic rich girl whose mother was an alcoholic, Ducky had problems with his brother, etc. They were a little more weighty than the Babysitters Club books, and I remember really getting into them after I started growing out of the Babysitters Club.

Wow, I really didn't mean to make such a long post. All I came in to do was mention that I was re-reading my old Noel Streatfeild books (Ballet Shoes, Theatre Shoes, etc.) and enjoying them! Ah, well, kid lit brings back lots of good memories.

fetch

Goosebumps didn't do anything for me, but there were a few books in the Fear Streey series that managed to creep me out a bit.

~*Echo*~

Yeah, I got into the Fear Street books more than I ever got into the Goosebumps ones, although I did enjoy a few of the Goosebumps ones. I remember liking one in particular about a kid who gets a camera that seems to predict/cause the injuries and deaths of people it takes a picture of. Say Cheese and Die! I believe that one was called (as a sidenote, I love the corny pulp horror names those books had).

Anyway, the Fear Street books were the ones I really got into. I still have a few of them, including all (three? four?) of the Cheerleader ones, The New Year's Party, Sunburn, and my personal favorite a few years back, Wrong Number. They're pretty teen slasher-y, but some of them have nice twists along the way before the teens defeat the psychopath of the week.

LaurieLaur

Years back, when I had a collection full of the Babysitter's Club books sitting on my shelves, I went to an Ann M. Martin signing. I still have the signed book somewhere, and can actually remember being so excited and waiting in the lines.

fetch

Heh, I liked Say Cheese...and Die! I think it was included in the TV series, too. I read them as a kid and wondered if anyone got scared by them
I remember a book he wrote, I think it was in the Fear Street series or one of the others, where there was a bunch of kids with an evil babysitter and the parents never believed until it was too late and one of the kids died and the other went crazy and the oldest went to jail, or something.

And one where there was a group of kids who cheated on the SATs and one of them feels guilty and decides to tell, so the others decide to kill her. But they miss, or she comes back to haunt them, and kills them one by one