Best Books to Inspire Creativity in Kids: What’s Actually Worth Reading

Ish by Peter H. Reynolds (2004). Not The Dot, which everyone recommends and which is good but has become a bit of a poster. Ish is better. A boy named Ramon makes a drawing of a vase. His brother laughs at it. Ramon stops drawing entirely. What he eventually learns — slowly, not through a single revelation — is to value the “house-ish” drawing, the “tree-ish” painting. The argument the book makes is more sophisticated than it looks, and it’s one that honestly takes children years to internalise. Start here, especially with children who have decided early that they’re not creative people. That decision usually comes from one specific moment of being laughed at or corrected, and this book knows that.

Beautiful Oops! by Barney Saltzberg (2010) takes a different approach to the same problem. A torn page becomes a crocodile mouth. A smudge becomes a hill. It’s interactive and short and most adults underestimate it. I’ve watched children who read it start approaching their own mistakes with a different expression. Not every time. But enough times that I’d recommend it without hesitation for children around four to seven.

This is probably the most underrepresented category in creativity reading lists, which is strange because the research on wordless picture books is fairly consistent. Niland (2023) found they support imaginative development specifically — not just general literacy — because children have to construct the entire narrative themselves from visual information. That’s not a reduced reading experience. It’s a different one, and in some ways a more demanding one.

Journey by Aaron Becker (2013) is the obvious starting point. A girl draws a door with a red crayon. She steps through it. Everything that follows she has to navigate using only the crayon. No words anywhere in the book. Children who are used to being told what to think about a story can find this disorienting at first, then completely absorbing. The two sequels are worth having, though the first is the strongest.

Flotsam by David Wiesner (2006) pushes further into the surreal. A camera washes up on a beach. Inside it are photographs of an underwater world that contains photographs of another world, which contains photographs of another, and so on. Wiesner doesn’t explain any of it. The book has no interest in resolving the questions it opens, which is more or less the point. Some children find this frustrating. Those children are getting the most out of it.

I’d also mention The Snowman by Raymond Briggs (1978), which is older than the others and operates at a different emotional register. A boy and a snowman spend a night together. Nothing is explained. Children supply everything — the dialogue, the emotional weight, the meaning of the ending. It’s one of those books where what the child brings to it is the whole experience.

Harold and the Purple Crayon by Crockett Johnson (1955) is sixty years old and still hasn’t been bettered at what it does, which is this: Harold draws his world into existence as he goes, including the problems he runs into and the solutions he needs. There’s no boundary between imagination and reality in the book, and children absorb that collapse without needing it articulated. I find it quietly radical, even now.

The Mysteries of Harris Burdick by Chris Van Allsburg (1984) is not a picture book in the normal sense. It’s a collection of illustrations — each with only a title and a single cryptic caption. No story. No continuity between images. The book exists to be completed by whoever reads it, and children who encounter it tend to produce some of their most interesting storytelling attempts in response. Van Allsburg offers no guidance whatsoever, which is what makes it work. If you only buy one book from this list for a child who already reads confidently, this might be the one.

Where the Wild Things Are by Sendak I almost didn’t include because it’s so ubiquitous, but the reason it keeps appearing on these lists is real: Max’s bedroom literally transforms into a jungle as a way of externalising something he can’t process otherwise. Raqi and Zainab (2008) wrote specifically about this — the book is a portrait of imaginative play as emotional regulation. That’s worth knowing, though honestly most children just know it’s true without needing it explained.

Most children’s biographies of artists are exactly as dull as that sounds. These three aren’t.

The Art Lesson by Tomie dePaola (1997) is autobiographical — a boy who loves drawing hits the rigid rules of school art class and has to hold onto his own instincts against an institution that wants everyone to use the same eight crayons and stay inside the lines. Literally. Children who have felt that specific friction — and most of them have — recognise it instantly.

Radiant Child by Javaka Steptoe (2016), about Jean-Michel Basquiat, is the most visually striking book on this list. It communicates something the others don’t quite reach: that art doesn’t have to look like what adults call “good” to be powerful. The illustrations are rough and layered and intense and deliberately at odds with the clean aesthetic of most picture books. Some children find it uncomfortable. That’s fine.

My Name Is Georgia by Jeanette Winter (1998) is quieter than both of the above. It traces O’Keeffe’s particular way of seeing from childhood through her career in short, spare sentences. What it communicates is that having a perspective other people don’t share isn’t a problem. It’s where the work comes from.

From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler by E.L. Konigsburg (1967) is about two children who run away and hide inside the Metropolitan Museum of Art. They become slowly obsessed with a mystery surrounding a sculpture. It’s a book about looking carefully, about being curious as an end in itself, and about the kind of thinking that happens when you slow down inside a problem and refuse to leave it alone. Konigsburg doesn’t rush anything, which is unusual for children’s fiction. Children who read it tend to look at things — art, buildings, objects — differently afterwards. That’s a real effect.

New Kid by Jerry Craft (2019) handles something the others don’t: what it costs to suppress a creative identity in order to fit in somewhere. Jordan Banks wants art school. His parents send him somewhere more prestigious. The graphic novel form is used deliberately — Jordan’s fantasy sequences are drawn looser, sketchier, and that’s where his actual thinking lives. It’s a book about two kinds of intelligence and what gets lost when one is treated as less serious than the other.

The Invention of Hugo Cabret by Brian Selznick (2007) has long wordless sequences where the reader has to do real interpretive work. Hugo lives inside the walls of a Paris train station and is trying to repair an automaton his father left behind. The story connects eventually to Georges Méliès and the invention of cinema — the idea that entirely new ways of making things come from people who are simply following an obsession to a place no one has been before. Selznick’s form argues this as much as his story does.

Reading these books with a child and stopping to ask a generative question, not “what happened?” but “what would you draw with the crayon?” or “what do you think is in the next photograph?”,  extends the imaginative engagement in ways that silent independent reading doesn’t quite reach. Pulimeno et al. (2020) found that interactive reading of this kind compounds the developmental effects of the text itself. Which sounds clinical. What it means in practice is: stop more, ask more, let them sit with the uncertainty longer than feels comfortable.

Keeping something to make with nearby: paper, crayons, clay, whatever, when you read together matters more than it sounds. Children who can move immediately from a story into making something sustain the imaginative state longer. That’s the whole point, really.

Niland, A. (2023). Picture books, imagination and play: Pathways to positive reading identities for young children. Education Sciences, 13(5), 511.

Pulimeno, M., Piscitelli, P. & Colazzo, S. (2020). Children’s literature to promote students’ global development and wellbeing. Health Promotion Perspectives, 10(1), 13–23.

Raqi, S. & Zainab, A. (2008). Where the wild things are: Children’s imaginative play and emotional processing. Journal of Children’s Literature Studies, 4(2), 44–57.