By C.S. Lewis
Four children climb through a wardrobe into Narnia, a world frozen in endless winter by a cruel Witch, and join the great lion Aslan in the fight to break her spell.
Four brothers and sisters are sent out of London during the war to stay in a big old house in the country. Poking around on a rainy afternoon, the youngest, Lucy, hides in a wardrobe full of fur coats and finds it doesn't end where it should. She steps out into a snowy wood in Narnia, where the animals talk and the White Witch has frozen the whole land into a winter that never once reaches Christmas. Soon all four children are through the wardrobe and caught up in the trouble, and everything turns on Aslan, the great lion the Witch is truly afraid of.
This is the book a lot of children point back to when you ask them when reading turned into something they'd choose on their own. It's a big adventure — a betrayal, a war, a lion who gives up his life — but Lewis wrote it in an easy, talkative voice, the kind that reads aloud without ever bogging down. It asks a little more of a child than a purely cozy story does, because of the sad stretch in the middle, and then it hands them six more books to fall into. If your child takes to it over a school break, you may not see much of them until they've finished the whole run.