We get it. You’re practicing social distancing (or you should be). The kids are home from school. The libraries are closed. You’re looking for some books the kids can read (or that you can read to them)… preferably with repeat reading value. We’ve got you covered.

In this series, we’ll round up and quickly recommend some books that either (a) come cheap online or your favorite local bookstore and are well worth the price or (b) have ebook versions you can quickly and easily download.

I’m just going to say it. Kate DiCamillo is a national treasure. The world is a better place because she and her books are in it.

(Listen to our conversation with Kate here, and watch the adorable Questions from a Kid chat with her here.)

She’s got a closet full of awards and accolades – she was the National Ambassador for Young People’s Literature and has won the Newbery Medal twice (for The Tale of Despereaux and Flora and Ulysses: The Illuminated Adventures) – and it’s all 100% deserved. She has an uncanny ability to write beautiful, heart-rending stories with the simplest of language.

And it’s precisely that skill that’s on full display in this brilliant trilogy of books. In using deceptively simple sentences and clear language, DiCamillo plays with your emotions and manipulates your feelings as if it were Pla-Doh. She makes us not only care about these characters but fall in love with them.

All three of these books deal with abandonment, both literal and figurative (though mostly literal). Each of these girls is in a broken home. Each is forced to deal with more heartache, uncertainty, and trauma than should be forced onto a child. Yet each still manages to stay positive and hopeful (even if it’s quiet, unspoken optimism). And each grows to realize that it’s their friendship for one another that helps them survive.

You’ll want to swoop them up and protect them. You’ll want to care for Raymie, Louisiana, and Beverly in ways their own parents and caregivers have failed to do. You’ll want to save them. And when they smile or find happiness, your heart will swell and you will soar.

That is the magic of Kate DiCamillo’s writing.

I’m not usually one to become emotionally compromised by a book – and maybe it’s because of the sudden isolation and increasingly dire current events – but these books tore me apart… in the best way possible. Louisiana’s Way Home and Beverly, Right Here, especially, affected me in a way few books ever have.

I read each in a single sitting, and – lord help me – I hugged them both after I finished them. I hugged them! That is most certainly not standard procedure for me.

Raymie Nightingale begins the trilogy and introduces us to a trio of 10-year-old girls in the summer of 1975: Raymie Clarke, Louisiana Elefante, and Beverly Tapinski. The story centers on Raymie, whose father recently ran off with another woman and who has devised a plan to bring him home. She’s going to learn how to twirl a baton, win the title of Little Miss Central Florida Tire 1975, get her picture in the paper, and create unending guilt in her father who will inevitably see that picture and come running home. That’s how the three girls meet (they’re all in the same baton twirling class), but it’s not the point of the story. The book is really about the girls’ sudden friendship and how it would shape and change each of their lives in unique ways.

“In some ways, this is a story of woe and confusion, but it is also a story of joy and kindness and free peanuts.” Louisiana’s Way Home takes place two years later and is told from the first-person perspective of Louisiana Elefante – gentle, heartbreaking, irresistible Louisiana Elefante. Louisiana is awoken before dawn by her grandmother (the “day of reckoning” has arrived), and she quickly ferries Louisiana away from the only world she’s ever known. Leaving her home, her friends, and her cat behind, Louisiana makes it to Richford, Georgia, where she is suddenly – and unexpectedly – forced to do quite a bit of growing up and find her own way in the world… all on her own.

“Just because you can’t stand to think about something don’t mean it ain’t happening, that it ain’t true.” Beverly, Right Here takes place another two years later and tracks tough-talking 14-year-old Beverly Tapinski (who isn’t afraid of anything) in the summer of 1979 when she runs away from home and a mother who couldn’t care less. Beverly’s story is less about what she runs away from than what she finds along the way. Which, as it turns out, is almost everything she didn’t think she needed: genuine human connections, acceptance, friendship, and a found family who helps her see herself with new eyes – who makes her feel seen. Needed. Loved.