The Best Clown Books for Kids

Clowns are built for picture books. Everything about them is big enough to read from the back row—the shoes, the nose, the enormous painted grin—and the whole job is falling over on purpose and getting back up. The best clown stories know that the pratfall is only half of it, so they follow the performer home too: the family living behind the tent, the trick rehearsed a hundred times, the face that comes off at the end of the night.

Drawing from Bookroo’s collection of clown books, our editors picked ten worth reading: a wordless award winner about a baby clown who bounces off a circus train, a Christmas show staged by a clown with nothing to stage it with, a first mystery a child can solve alone, a picture-book biography of a man who clowned in a baseball uniform, and—for readers who ask for them—a couple of genuinely spooky ones. Start with the shortlist below, then follow the related topics out to the wider circus and performing-arts collections.