The Best Donkey Books for Kids

Call an animal stubborn long enough and it stops getting credit for anything else. A donkey that plants its feet halfway up a trail is not sulking; it has looked at the drop, decided the odds are bad, and declined — the same caution that made it the animal people have trusted with the load, and with the child riding on top of the load, for thousands of years. Everything else about a donkey seems designed to undercut it: the ears, the bray you can hear from the next valley over, the fact that it gets handed the least glamorous job in the story every time. Children’s books have been quietly on the donkey’s side the whole time. On the page, the one nobody picked is usually the one carrying the thing that matters most.

Drawing from Bookroo’s collection of donkey books, our editors picked twelve that cover the whole paddock: the cumulative rhyme a grandmother made famous by laughing too hard to finish it, the Caldecott Medal winner about a wish that goes catastrophically wrong, the comedy about a donkey who is fairly sure he is a cat, the Bethlehem and Jerusalem donkeys carrying more than they know, and — for older readers — a graphic novel about a shoemaker with an impossible order and the 1953 classic about a real burro living wild at the bottom of the Grand Canyon. Start with the shortlist below, then browse by age: board books for the first bray, picture books for the read-aloud years, and chapter books for readers who want a donkey with a job.