Your child has read the funny stuff and the fantasy, and now you'd like to hand them a story about real children in the real world, but you don't want to drop them straight into heartbreak. Start here. Each book builds on the last, beginning with an ordinary, laugh-out-loud family year and climbing, one careful step at a time, toward the harder things real life asks a child to feel, so they grow into realistic fiction instead of being ambushed by it.
What climbs across this trail is how much real life each story asks your child to sit with. Start here means exactly that: the first book is just an ordinary, funny family year, the kind of everyday realness a child can enjoy without bracing for anything. From there each step lets a little more of the real world in, a parent who left, poverty and prejudice, the shame of struggling at school, until the last two rungs ask the most, a beloved grandfather changing for good and a child who lives with people staring. There's a warm breather partway up on purpose. A child can start wherever the real still feels like fun, and every rung was chosen to be barely weightier than the one before it.