By Marguerite de Angeli
The Newbery-winning story of a medieval nobleman's son who loses the use of his legs and finds his own kind of courage, right up to saving a besieged castle.
Robin is the son of a great lord in medieval England, raised to become a knight. Then he falls ill, and when the fever breaks his legs no longer work. His father is away at war and his mother with the queen, and with a plague loose in the city the servants who should mind him vanish. A monk named Brother Luke finds him and takes him to the monastery, where instead of pitying Robin he teaches him: to swim, to carve wood, to read, and to look for 'the door in the wall,' the way through when the path you expected is closed. Robin grows strong in new ways, and when the castle he's sent to comes under siege, it's Robin, on his crutches, who slips through the enemy lines to bring help.
This is the top of the shelf, where knights and castles stop being play and become a real story with real weight. It's set in the world your child already loves, full of monks and minstrels and a genuine siege, but its hero is a boy who can't walk and has to find another way to be brave. For a child who's ever felt held back by their own body, or who just wants a knight story with a real heart in it, Robin is unforgettable. It's an older Newbery winner, so the prose asks more, which is exactly the stretch a strong reader is ready for.