The Animal Family

Randall Jarrell was one of America's finest poets, and The Animal Family reads like it. A lone hunter by the sea befriends a mermaid, and together they gradually adopt a bear cub, a lynx cub, and a small boy who washes ashore — each of them an orphan of some kind, all of them becoming family through love and shared story. Maurice Sendak's quiet illustrations give the book a timeless, dreamlike quality. The 2025 HarperCollins reissue of this 1966 Newbery Honor Book makes it newly available, and it deserves the attention. The honest caveat is pacing: this is ruminative, slow, and written at a literary register well above typical middle-grade. Younger readers will need an adult to guide them into it. But for the patient reader — child or adult — it is genuinely extraordinary. Gentle references to death; no content concerns.