The Best California Books for Kids

A board-book train rolls past California’s bridges, beaches, mountains, and movie lights without ever leaving a lap.

A boy picks up a book on the subway and looks up to find himself standing in an old-growth redwood forest.

A girl who preferred trees to parties grew up to plant the ones that turned dusty San Diego green.

Thirty miles from San Francisco, great white sharks arrive each fall to hunt in a place people can watch from a boat.

A San Francisco newsboy is on the street when the ground starts moving on the morning of April 18, 1906.

A young sea otter raised in Monterey Bay meets a shark, loses her old life, and has to learn a new one.

A twelve-year-old and his impeccable butler stow away on a ship to the 1849 gold fields to save the family house.

Left behind on an island off the California coast, a girl builds a life alone for eighteen years.

In 1935 a boy moves to Alcatraz, where his father works, his sister needs him, and Al Capone does the laundry.

A ranch owner’s daughter loses everything and starts over in a California farm labor camp during the Depression.