By Roald Dahl
A lonely orphan escapes his two awful aunts by climbing into a house-sized peach and floating across the ocean with a crew of giant, kindhearted insects.
After his parents are killed, James gets handed to his two dreadful aunts, Sponge and Spiker, who work him all day and never let him play. One afternoon a spill of magic green crystals near an old tree grows a single peach until it's bigger than a house. James crawls through a tunnel into the middle of it and finds a crew already living there — a grasshopper, a ladybug, a centipede, a spider, an earthworm, all grown as big as he is. The peach breaks loose, and off they roll together on the trip of a lifetime.
It's Dahl at full tilt: short chapters, a mistreated child who finally catches a break, villains you're allowed to hate, and a crew of squabbling bugs your child will pick a favorite from fast. Most chapters end on a hook, so it reads well one at a time. It asks a little more than the gentlest books on this shelf — more feeling, a bit more danger, more of Dahl's mischief — and still comes out somewhere warm. If your child has been coasting on easy chapter books, this is a good one to hand them next.