Classic Starts

Sterling Publishing's Classic Starts series has moved more than eight million copies for a reason: it makes beloved adventure classics genuinely accessible to seven-to-ten-year-olds who aren't ready for the full originals. The Jack London volume in this series — most likely White Fang or The Call of the Wild — brings the Yukon wilderness, survival stakes, and the fierce loyalty between humans and animals into an illustrated hardcover format that holds up to repeated reading. Survival-themed violence is present but handled age-appropriately, consistent with London's source material. The honest caveat is that abridgment strips away some of London's raw prose power, and the specific 2020 volume catalogued here couldn't be precisely pinned down. As an introduction to classic adventure literature, the series delivers reliably.