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

Question 1

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 2

Which book, kept between 1942 and 1944 by a teenage girl hiding with her family and four others in a concealed set of rooms behind her father's business in Amsterdam, records daily friction, first love, and hope, including the line that she still believes people are truly good at heart?

Question 3

Which 2012 young-adult novel narrates the romance between two teenagers who meet at a cancer support group in the church basement, one carrying an oxygen tank, the other having lost a leg, who bond over a novel that stops mid-sentence?

Question 4

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?

Question 5

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 6

Which series of 21 books, begun in 1942 by one of the best-selling authors who has ever lived, sends four children, Julian, Dick, Anne and a fierce short-haired girl who insists on a boy's name, plus a dog, on holiday adventures involving smugglers, secret passages and an island with a ruined castle?

Question 7

Which 1900 American fantasy drops a Kansas farm girl and her little dog into a bright country by cyclone, killing a wicked witch on landing, and sends her down a road paved with yellow brick to ask a humbug ruler for the way home?

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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.