Children's & Young-Adult Books Quiz — 7 Free Questions

Question 1

Which thirteen-book series, narrated by a gloomy author who keeps warning the reader to put the book down, follows three orphaned siblings, an inventor, a bookworm and a biting baby, passed from guardian to guardian after their parents die in a house fire?

Question 2

Which Indian author set most of his gentle, comic fiction in an invented small town in the south of the country called Malgudi, and drew young readers with books such as Swami and Friends and a much-watched television series of linked Malgudi stories?

Question 3

Which 1939 rhyming picture book opens in an old house in Paris that was covered with vines, where twelve little girls live in two straight lines under the care of a nun, and the smallest and boldest is the title girl?

Question 4

Which seven-book series by C. S. Lewis is often read in a different order from the one in which it was published, because a later volume tells how a cabby and his wife became the first king and queen of the world in question and how a lamppost came to grow in a wood?

Question 5

Which 1968 picture book has a large, polite striped animal ring a suburban doorbell at teatime, invite itself in, and calmly eat and drink everything in the kitchen, all the food, all the water in the tap, before saying thank you and leaving?

Question 6

Which 1930 novel, first of a long series, lets four children camp unsupervised on a lake island in a borrowed sailing dinghy one summer, after their absent naval father cables that if they are not duffers they won't drown and if they are duffers they had better?

Question 7

Which 1906 Swedish book, commissioned as a school reader to teach the country's geography, shrinks a lazy, cruel farm boy to thumb size as a punishment from an elf?

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About Children's & Young-Adult Books

This quiz is about the books children and teenagers have loved for a century and more: the picture books read aloud at bedtime, the school and adventure stories, the fairy-tale collections, and the young-adult novels that adults quietly read too. Eighty questions, each describing a book, a character, a series or an author's body of work for young readers, and asking you to name it from four choices, then explaining it. Only world-famous, world-level titles are used.

The first pack is the bedrock: Alice, Winnie-the-Pooh, The Wind in the Willows, Peter Pan, the first Narnia book, Charlotte's Web, Where the Wild Things Are, the big Roald Dahl titles, the first Harry Potter, The Hobbit, The Little Prince, Anne of Green Gables, Dr. Seuss, The Very Hungry Caterpillar, The Gruffalo, The Secret Garden, Peter Rabbit and The Hunger Games.

The second pack widens out: more Dahl, the Oz and Alice sequels, A Wrinkle in Time, Pippi Longstocking, the Moomins, Heidi, the Narnia, His Dark Materials and Percy Jackson series, picture books from The Snowman to Madeline to Ferdinand, The Railway Children, Swallows and Amazons, Black Beauty, The Jungle Book, Pinocchio, the Grimm and Andersen and Aesop collections, the Indian Panchatantra and R. K. Narayan, Tintin, Asterix, the Dr. Seuss readers, and the modern YA landmarks The Book Thief, Watership Down, The Outsiders, Bridge to Terabithia, The Giver and Diary of a Wimpy Kid.

The third pack covers the great commercial series from The Famous Five and Nancy Drew to Goosebumps and Captain Underpants, more picture books, Stuart Little and The Phantom Tollbooth, The Worst Witch, Anne Frank's diary, and the recent YA hits Wonder, The Fault in Our Stars, Twilight and Divergent, plus Artemis Fowl, Geronimo Stilton, the Chinese Journey to the West and the Arabian Nights.

The wrong answers are always other children's books, series or authors of the same kind, so a shaky guess is easily caught and a sure one quickly confirmed. Because every option is the same sort of thing, a neutral picture, a shelf of old books, a library, a quill and inkwell, an old typewriter, is equally consistent with all four and cannot point to any one of them, so about fifteen questions carry one for atmosphere.

The span runs from Victorian nursery classics to books published in the last twenty years, and well beyond the English-speaking world: the French Little Prince, Tintin and Asterix, the Swedish Pippi and Nils, the Finnish Moomins, the Swiss Heidi, the Italian Pinocchio and Geronimo Stilton, the Chinese Journey to the West, the Indian Panchatantra and R. K. Narayan, and the Arabian Nights. Picture books, fairy-tale and fable collections, long-running commercial series and single landmark novels all count. Plots, dates and attributions have been checked against standard reference works.