By Kenneth Grahame
Four animal friends share an English riverbank, and one rich, reckless Toad falls so hard for motor-cars he wrecks them one after another.
Mole drops his spring cleaning, climbs up out of his hole, and meets Rat, who lives on the river and swears there is nothing in the world half so good as messing about in boats. Their friendship is the center of the book. Most of it is warm, wandering days on the water and in the Wild Wood, where gruff old Badger keeps an eye on everyone. What keeps a child turning pages is Toad — rich, boastful, hopeless Toad of Toad Hall, who falls madly in love with motor-cars, wrecks seven of them, lands in prison, breaks out disguised as a washerwoman, and comes home to find the weasels have taken over his house. So the four friends grab sticks and swords and storm it back.
Your child will love this one for its world more than its plot, and it's built to be read aloud over a lot of nights rather than raced through. The riverbank is about the most comforting place in all of children's writing, and Toad hands even a squirmy listener something to laugh at and root for. A well-illustrated hardcover — Shepard's line drawings, or Inga Moore's paintings — is genuinely lovely to own and hand down. One honest caveat about the pace: this is Edwardian prose, unhurried and thick with description, and it reads far better aloud than handed to a reluctant seven-year-old to get through alone.