Novels about children meeting their grandparents as young people

October 25, 2020 12:22 PM

I enjoyed the books Back to Blackbrick by Sarah Moore Fitzgerald and When Marnie Was There by Joan G Robinson. They are both stories about children who meet a younger version of a grandparent, in some form. What other books are like this?

Time travel is not strictly required, and I'm also not interested in general books about time-traveling children - I'm only interested when it allows them to interact with younger versions of their older family members.

I don't care if it's a children's book or not. I also don't care if it's a grandparent, but ideally a family member who is unavailable in some form in their regular life.

posted by smcg to Media & Arts (12 answers total)

Best answer: in edward eager's magic by the lake and the time garden the siblings from the 1920s interact with their children and niblings from the 1950s

in francine pascal's( she wrote this herself before the sweet valley high books) hanging out with cici Victoria encounters her mother as a kid in the 1940s
posted by brujita at 12:39 PM on October 25, 2020 [6 favorites]

Not a book, but Peggy Sue Got Married comes to mind.
posted by nkknkk at 12:56 PM on October 25, 2020

Best answer: Jane Yolen's The Devil's Arithmetic

(This is a Holocaust novel about a modern day Jewish girl who travels back in time to 1940s Poland.)
posted by angst at 3:20 PM on October 25, 2020

Best answer: A Dig in Time. Children are able to travel back to points in their family's history, but if I remember correctly this only works for blood relatives.
posted by lharmon at 5:09 PM on October 25, 2020

Best answer: Displacement by Kiku Hughes, is a graphic novel, about a teenager who time travels to meet her grandmother in a Japanese internment camp.
posted by coevals at 6:27 PM on October 25, 2020

Best answer: The Fourteenth Goldfish, by Jennifer Holm. Grandpa was de-aged, so he moves in and goes to school with the narrator.
posted by gideonfrog at 6:31 PM on October 25, 2020

Best answer: A book I loved as a kid and which held up on recent reread was "The Singing Stone" by OR Melling.
posted by jeather at 7:22 PM on October 25, 2020 [1 favorite]

Best answer: Octavia Butler’s Kindred has a meet-the-family-elders element
posted by childofTethys at 1:52 AM on October 26, 2020

Best answer: A Swiftly Tilting Planet by Madeleine L'Engle (one of the sequels to A Wrinkle In Time) does this.
posted by Daily Alice at 5:42 AM on October 26, 2020 [1 favorite]

Best answer: A Handful of Time by Kit Pearson is a really lovely example of this scenario.
posted by dotparker at 8:21 AM on October 26, 2020

Best answer: I remember reading Building Blocks by Cynthia Voigt when I was a kid and I think it would fit the bill.

In this YA novel, a boy is tired of his parents fighting, so he goes to the basement and falls asleep in a fortress made of blocks. When he wakes up, he has traveled into the past and his dad is two years younger than him. He spends a day with his dad and his dad's family and learns more about why his dad behaves the way he does as an adult.

I made a shadow box of part of the story that takes place in a cave when I was about 10 years old, so that might be why the book stuck with me.
posted by tacodave at 5:35 PM on October 26, 2020

Response by poster: Thanks everyone, that's given me plenty to look at!
posted by smcg at 12:24 PM on October 27, 2020