If you're looking for a Christmas or holiday gift for a grade-school age child, or are seeking unusual birthday presents, why not forego the toy or video game and get the boy or girl an old-fashioned, real paper...book! Yes, that's right, those old things.  The trick to getting a book for a kid is choosing one that can compete with all the fancy electronic distractions in the modern child's life. If you don't read children's books yourself, the choices can seem overwhelming, but there really are books that good.  Since the craze of J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter books, young readers have been looking around for more books "like Harry Potter." In other words, fantasy books about regular kids getting up to fantastic magical adventures.

Fantasy books that are exciting, imaginative and addicting. Well, these books already exist, and they were written decades ago (but not too long ago to be accessible)! They were written by Diana Wynne Jones, a not-very-well-known-in-America British author of children's books.  I'm a big fan of Jones and can recommend some that will blow your children's minds.

Possibly the best-known book by Diana Wynne Jones because of the Japanese anime movie that was based on it, Howl's Moving Castle is a hilarious, thoroughly imaginative fairytale book for kids age 6 through, well, 80. I'll certainly be re-reading my copy as long as I have my eyesight and the pages are intact.

You'd think that girls might like this one better than boys, since it's big on romance. But the adventure quotient is high, and Howl is a dashing role model, and boys won't be bored by any means.

A young woman gets cursed by a wicked witch into growing instantly old, and must seek out help. She ends up teaming up with the frightening Wizard Howl and his unusual sidekick--a ball of flames named Calcifer.

Jones pokes fun at fairytale tropes even as she succeeds in making those tropes come to life. A very realistic, believable fantasy world that ends leaving you wanting more...which is why she wrote the sequels, Castle in the Air and House of Many Ways.

Intelligent young adults as well as precocious pre-teens will be amazed by Hexwood, which is partially fantasy and partially science fiction. A complex story that kids mysteriously seem to get--understanding the minds of kids is a rare talent to Jones's credit--Hexwood is an example of the power of brilliant prose to lead the reader on into a world that is not the world you think...a world that changes on each page and somehow, by the end, makes a crazy kind of sense.

The plot? A machine gone rogue called the Bannus poses a threat to the people who are currently ruling the universe. So they go to Earth to investigate what's going on...and it's the last thing they expect.

That's all I'll say, because almost anything you say about this book is a spoiler. Suffice it to say a smart boy or girl, a kid with a wild imagination, a kid who loves time travel, or a child who likes stories of King Arthur and dragons will not be disappointed.

A perfect book for pre-teen to young adult girls or boys, since it features a girl protagonist as well as two boy protagonistis, A Tale of Time City is one of the best time travel fantasy books for kids ever. 

A British girl being sent via railroad to the country during the raids of World War II finds herself kidnapped by two very strange boys in odd suits.  They take her to Time City, an enchanting city outside of time where people study the different time periods of history.  Desperate to get home, yet finding herself getting caught up in trying to prevent a plot to destroy Time City, the girl gets sucked into the world and learns some very surprising things about time itself.

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