Burying treasure is a strange thing to do with a fortune, and children notice this immediately. You have the gold. You take it somewhere difficult. You put it in the ground, draw a picture of where the ground is, and then — this is the important part — you die, or lose the picture, or tell one person too many. Every buried treasure story is really a story about someone else's terrible plan, and the reader's job is to be smarter about it a hundred years later, usually with a shovel and a friend who is not much help.
Drawing from Bookroo's collection of 190 buried treasure books, our editors chose fourteen where somebody actually digs: a dry Texas lakebed dug one hole at a time, a chest hidden in a suburban backyard, a box of gold coins under a haunted house floor, an abandoned Arizona mine, and the island where Long John Silver's crew arrives to find a very large, very empty pit. Start with the shortlist, then use the shelves below — picture books for children who mainly want a map and a place to dig, and chapter books for readers ready for the part where the treasure turns out to be guarded.
