About
Which is a thing I believed long before I knew there was a word for it.
I founded Book Quote Therapy, where I find books for grown-ups who are going through something. People kept asking me the same question about their children, and it turned out to be a different job altogether.
An adult can usually name the thing. A child often cannot, and would not want to talk about it even if they could. What they will do is listen to a story about somebody else in the same trouble. So the whole shape of the recommending changes: shorter books, four age bands rather than one, and a note to the grown-up about what is actually inside before they read it aloud at bedtime.
That did not fit alongside the adult site, so it got its own.
My grandmother gave me A Child’s Garden of Verses when I was about seven, and read it to me. Around the same age my grandfather used to walk me down to the bookshop in his village, hand in hand, and let me look at everything on the shelves and choose one to take home. Those are among my earliest memories, and they are the ones that took.
I needed them. I grew up inside a strict religious community, in a childhood where difficult things were not discussed and feelings were not something you shared. So I lost myself in books instead. A book was a room nobody else could come into, and I could stay in it as long as I wanted.
That never stopped. When something happened later that I could not find my way through, I went looking for people who had been through it and written it down, and their words did the work that nobody around me could. I have written about all of that properly over on Book Quote Therapy, which is the grown-up side of this.
I read to my two daughters from the time they were babies, before either of them could follow a word of it. Later, when one of them was frightened of something, or a friendship had come apart, or somebody had died, I would find a book with that in it and leave it lying about.
Sometimes we read it together and talked afterwards. More often they read it alone and never mentioned it, and something had quietly shifted by the following week.
They are both grown now, and both of them still do it. When something goes wrong they reach for a book, or they write. That is the part I would want any parent to hear: you are not only getting them through this week, you are showing them where to go for the rest of their lives.
Bibliotherapy is the use of books as part of looking after somebody's wellbeing: choosing a story for the person and the moment rather than for the reading level. It is used by therapists, counsellors, school librarians and teachers, and it has a long and well-documented history, particularly with children.
Most parents will never use the word, and they do not need to. But if you are a counsellor, a therapist, a teacher or a school librarian and you have arrived here looking for children's bibliotherapy resources, this is what this site is. Ninety-seven topics, four age bands, every book read or checked, and a note on each one saying who it suits and what is in it.
Every book here has been verified: that it exists, that the author is right, that the publisher's age range matches the band it sits in, and that it is genuinely about the thing the page is about rather than adjacent to it. No book appears more than twice across the whole site, so nothing is padded out with the same handful of titles.
Where a book carries something heavy, a death, a frightening scene, a parent who does not come back, the note says so. You should not be ambushed by page ninety of something you are reading at bedtime.
Nothing here is sponsored and nobody has paid to be included. If a book is not right, I have left it out. Book links are affiliate links, which is how the site pays for itself, and your library will have most of these.
I am Georgia Clare, a writer and a mother of two grown daughters, living in a village in south west France with a forest behind the house.
Alongside this I write at Book Quote Therapy, make prints of the lines worth keeping at BookQuoteDecor, run a guided way into reading at The Literary Compass, and keep my own books and guided meditations at georgiaclare.com.
And if the hard thing is yours rather than your child’s, which it often is at the same time, Book Quote Therapy does exactly this for grown-ups.
If there is a topic your child needs and it is not here, I would like to know. It is how most of these pages got written, and there is a button for it at the foot of this page.
Three ways on from here.
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Say it however you would say it out loud. Won’t go to school, wakes in the night, no one to sit with at lunch.