Can anyone suggest a few titles Children's titles that have very few characters in? Ideally looking for the 9-11 bracket upwards.

Daddy drinks because you cry.

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OOps. You meant characters as in letters? Oh dear.

From what I remember, Paul Gallico's children's books have a small cast of characters, eg: The Snow Goose.


- NaomiM

Thanks for that Naomi

Gaius I can see how you managed to interpret it that way, I'm a sucker for a short title but I was referring to the number of characters in the story.

Books with small numbers of characters are usually to be found in survival situations - I'm sure I read several as a child where pairs of children were stranded in the outback, in forests, in frozen wastes, on islands, the American prairies, etc. Sorry, can't remember any titles, though.


- NaomiM

That's a damn shame as that's the kind of thing I have in mind for my book!

Though I did come across this list

Survival Lit for kids

That's a damn shame as that's the kind of thing I have in mind for my book!

Why's that a shame, Colin? Don't let it stop you from writing your own version.

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I remember the 'lost on the American Prairie' one was written by Louis L'Amour, and of the dozens of L'Amour books I read back then, it made the greatest impression on me.
As I remember it, Laura Engles Wilder's Little House on the Prairie books, also had a limited cast of characters and a great Frontier's feel to them.



- NaomiM

Morpurgo's Kensuke's Kingdom only has two characters, as I recall. Certainly it does for the bulk of the story.

Haven't read it for years, but another classic is E L Konigsberg's The Mixed-up Files of Mrs Basil E. Frankweiler, where again the bulk of the story is the narrator and her brother.

Emma

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Also Walkabout - three characters.

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Yes, the early Ingalls Wilder ones are very small casts - when she's young (= enclosed world) and they're in the real frontier territory.

The adults in the Swallows and Amazons are very peripheral, so the main cast is usually only 4 or 6. Most of We Didn't Mean to Go to Sea is the four of them swept out into the North Sea at night, in someone else's boat.

Hatchet by Gary Paulsen is a survival story with really just one character, as I remember.

Isn't My Side of the Mountain (can't remember the author) pretty much a boy on his own?

Emma

I remember the film version of My Side Of The Mountain - the book was the first of a trilogy and has a Wikipedia entry:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/My_Side_of_the_Mountain