By Dorothy Canfield Fisher
A worried, fussed-over city child gets sent to a Vermont farm where nobody fusses over her at all, and she turns out to be somebody entirely different.
Elizabeth Ann is nine and everyone in her house is anxious about her. Her Aunt Frances hovers, worries about her nerves, walks her to school, and asks her about her bad dreams until she has more of them. Then Aunt Harriet gets a cough that won't go away, the doctor finds a bad spot on her lung, and the household breaks up. Elizabeth Ann is packed off to the Putney cousins on their farm in Vermont, the very relatives she has been taught to dread. And the Putneys just hand her things to do. Drive the horse home. Get your own breakfast. Figure out your own arithmetic. Nobody asks how she feels about any of it. Within a few months she is Betsy, she can cook and manage a cart and hold her own, and she finds out that the person she was scared of being was never really her.
This is the one on the shelf about a child, rather than about birds or maps or fables, and it lands with a particular child: the one who has been handled carefully. Betsy is competent long before she believes she is, and your child watches her find that out in real time, through hauling water and counting change and getting a friend out of a hole in the ground. Fisher wrote it to argue for letting children do their own work, so the whole book runs on small tasks a child can picture doing themselves. It reads aloud beautifully and it's funny about grown-ups in a way children very much enjoy.