Your child wants cows. Every cow, all the cows, and the pigs and the hens and the tractor too. This is a shelf for exactly that: a barnyard square dance for a two year old, a farm day that ends in sleep, a hen with a fox behind her, cows who go on strike over cold nights, a little tractor who pulls a calf out of the mud, and Charlotte's Web waiting at the far end. Pick by your child's age. One thing worth saying out loud before you do: a farm is where food comes from, and farm books split into the ones that keep that offstage and the ones that don't. Five of these six keep it offstage. Charlotte's Web tells your child that Wilbur is being fattened for slaughter, and then lets Charlotte die.
These are all for the same child, the one who cannot get enough of farms, but they come at it from completely different angles, which is what makes it a shelf. There's a square dance with no plot at all, a lulling farm day, a wordplay-free slapstick chase, a comedy about cows with demands, a tractor story with a real ache in it, and one great novel. You reach for whichever fits the child in front of you tonight. Here's the honest bit, since it's the thing farm books quietly disagree about. Barnyard Dance!, Big Red Barn, and Otis give your child a farm where animals are friends and nothing is ever raised for the table. Rosie's Walk has an appetite in it, but it belongs to a fox, and he goes hungry. Click, Clack, Moo runs entirely on milk and eggs, so it's the one that lets on why the farm exists, without ever saying so. And Charlotte's Web says it straight: Wilbur is a spring pig and spring pigs do not see the winter, unless a spider intervenes. A child who loves cows may not have joined cows to beef yet. That's your call to make and your timing to pick, so this shelf gives you the facts and gets out of the way.