By C. S. Lewis
The whole Narnia saga, all seven books, in one thick full-color volume with Pauline Baynes' original pictures.
Four children climb through the back of a wardrobe into Narnia, a country locked in a hundred-year winter by a White Witch, where a great lion named Aslan is finally on the move. That's just the first book. This one volume carries all seven, following Narnia from the morning it's sung into being to the day it ends. Along the way there's a boy and a talking flying horse, a voyage to the eastern edge of the world aboard a ship called the Dawn Treader, a mouse braver than any knight, a prince lost for years in a kingdom under the earth, and more than one war for the throne. Pauline Baynes drew these stories when Lewis first wrote them, and here every one of her pictures is printed in full color.
The pull here is getting the whole world at once instead of chasing down seven paperbacks one at a time. A child who falls for the wardrobe on Monday can be aboard the Dawn Treader by the weekend, with nowhere the story stops and makes them wait. It's a lot of book, seven full novels, so it lasts: a year of bedtimes and then years on the shelf to go back to. Lewis writes like someone telling the story out loud, half to himself and half to you, and Baynes' color plates are the pictures these books grew up with. I'd hand it to a child ready for a real fantasy world who hates when a good one ends after a single volume. One thing to know going in: these are Christian stories wearing an adventure, and Aslan's death and return is written to echo Easter on purpose. Some families choose it for exactly that, and it's fair to know it's there either way.