I like to think of my 90’s childhood as marking a renaissance in the realm of children’s books. I’m sure it’s just nostalgia, but some of the titles that we were offered seem like they were a lot better than the smiley-and-glittery titles offered to kids and teens today. I can certainly say that the books that we were reading were more whimsical, perhaps a bit more magical, and were definitely spiked with more adult themes than we’re letting our kids read today. Unless, of course, those themes are sexy times, themes that they are certainly getting and we thankfully did not.

Here is a list of some of my favorite childhood book titles:  

The Rainbow Fish by Marcus Pfister. The Rainbow Fish is a sweet little book with murky, watercolor pictures of a fish who earns his shiny scales like the rest of his family. The pictures are what kids will remember, but the lesson of self-acceptance is what kids will learn.

Goosebumps. R.L. Stine’s Goosebumps series was creeping me out as soon as I was old enough to read (a short novel). Featuring stories about a possessed ventriloquist dummy, ghosts and summer camp, I’ve been scared of my own shadow ever since.

The Giver by Lois Lowry. The dystopian children’s book published in 1993 is now a controversial classic. The book’s main character, Jonas, lives in a land in which everyone undergoes a condition called “Sameness,” in which they can’t remember anything about their old lives. Jonas is about to be named the “Receiver of Memory,” or all of the specifics about what came before.

The Baby-sitters Club. I read almost the entire series about a group of middle-school babysitters who formed a club in Connecticut to corral all of their unruly babysitting charges and parents. The club included all of the great female archetypes of all times including the jock, Kristy Thomas, the artistic Asian, Claudia Kishi, and the pretty rich girl, Stacey McGill.

The Face on the Milk Carton series by Caroline Cooney. I was obsessed with The Face on the Milk Carton trilogies because the series offered such a bizarre escape from suburban life. In them, the main character, Janie, finds her picture on a carton of milk in her school’s cafeteria. She calls the number on the package to find out that she was kidnapped from a family of redheads named the Sands when she was a little girl. The subsequent books in the series talk about Janie’s adjustment to this fact.