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

Question 1

Which 1977 Newbery Medal novel has a rural boy who trains to be the fastest runner in his grade befriend the new girl next door, an unconventional city child, and invent with her a secret woodland kingdom reached by swinging over a creek on a rope?

Question 2

Which 2005 novel, narrated by Death, is set in a small German town during the Second World War, where a foster girl on Himmel Street learns to read from a stolen gravedigger's manual and goes on snatching books, including some from a Nazi bonfire?

Question 3

Which 2011 dystopian trilogy opener is set in a ruined, walled Chicago whose people are sorted at sixteen into five factions, each devoted to a single virtue, selflessness, bravery, intelligence, honesty or kindness, with the factionless left destitute?

Question 4

Which Belgian comics series, drawn in a clean, shadowless style its creator's followers call the clear line, follows a quiffed young reporter and his white terrier through adventures on every continent and, in two volumes, to the Moon?

Question 5

Which collection, first published in 1812 by two German brothers who were also pioneering scholars of language and law, gathered household stories from friends and servants rather than inventing them?

Question 6

Which 1972 novel began as a story told to the author's daughters on car journeys and follows a band of rabbits who flee their warren after the smallest of them has a vision of the field covered in blood?

Question 7

Which 1945 Swedish creation is a freckled nine-year-old of superhuman strength who lives with no parents in a tumbledown house with a monkey and a horse she can lift with one hand, and a suitcase full of gold coins?

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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.