Critical Linking

20 Books For Kids To Travel The World: Critical Linking, April 1, 2020

Jamie Canaves

Contributing Editor

Jamie Canavés is the Tailored Book Recommendations coordinator and Unusual Suspects mystery newsletter writer–in case you’re wondering what you do with a Liberal Arts degree. She’s never met a beach she didn’t like, always says yes to dessert, loves ‘80s nostalgia, all forms of entertainment, and can hold a conversation using only gifs. You can definitely talk books with her on Litsy and Goodreads. Depending on social media’s stability maybe also Twitter and Bluesky.

Critical Linking, a daily roundup of the most interesting bookish links from around the web is sponsored by our giveaway of a $250 gift card to Barnes and Noble! Enter here.


“Even if your family’s spring break plans were canceled due to the coronavirus crisis, your kids can still travel the world—through books. Great novels and amazingly illustrated adventures can immerse them instantly in the culture and history of a place. (Sorry, Instagram.)

So get children exploring while still practicing social distancing through these 18 destinations featured in classic and lesser known books. And don’t be surprised if these stories end up inspiring future real-life travels when it’s time to venture out into the world again.”

Let your kids tour the world from the safety of home.


“While there is loss, my ancestors filled it for me with a thousand ways of love, with power, with dreams, with caretaking one another and this earth, with anger, with rage, with story. Our loss can’t exist—because it is so great it would kill us—if my ancestors and my community and family had not filled that loss with enough things to hold it, to handle it (though not always to handle it “well”), to exist within it or next to it. I can be the wound, or I can be what happens to the wound as it becomes something different, maybe not always something less painful, but something also new. The blood, the cicatrix, the scab, the scar, the thing after the wound. If you take the tuna or fruit from a prickly pear, or even taken its nopal, it will continue to grow more nopals. It will continue to fruit again.”

If you read one thing today let it be Natalie Diaz’s words.


“After receiving a very enthusiastic response when he “randomly and elegantly recited Shakespeare’s Sonnet 116 to his fans on social media,” writes Laughing Squid, Stewart “decided to read one Shakespeare sonnet aloud each day in hopes of ‘keeping the doctor away.’” Think of it as preventative medicine for the itchy, cooped-up soul. On his Instagram, Sir Patrick shows up lounging comfortably in casual clothes, furthering the illusion that he’s joined us in our living rooms—or we’ve joined him in his.”

Marathon some sonnets.