Ronia the Robber's Daughter

On the night Ronia was born, a thunderstorm split her father's mountain fortress clean in two. Ronia grows up dancing and yelling with the robbers, learning the forest's every danger — the grey dwarfs, the wild harpies, the terrible chasm of Hell's Gap — until the day she meets Birk, the son of her father's bitterest enemy. Astrid Lindgren's last novel, published in 1981 and the book that inspired Studio Ghibli's beloved animated series, is a Romeo and Juliet story for children — two feuding clans, a forbidden friendship, children forced to choose between loyalty to family and loyalty to each other — but it is also something richer and stranger: a love letter to the forest, to wildness, to the particular freedom of a child who has been trusted to find her own way. Ronia is one of the great heroines of children's literature, as fierce and funny and full of life as Pippi Longstocking, but more complex. For ages eight and up.