Heidi

Heidi, orphaned at five, is left in the care of her reclusive grandfather, known locally simply as the Alm Uncle, in a hut high in the Swiss Alps that the rest of the village avoids out of old suspicion. Her open, unaffected warmth wins the old man over almost immediately, and she spends her days with the goatherd Peter and his goats on the mountain, thriving on the air, the milk, and the freedom of a life with almost no restrictions on it at all. Heidi's aunt then sends her to Frankfurt as a companion for Clara Sesemann, a wealthy girl confined to a wheelchair, where the household's strict housekeeper, Fraulein Rottenmeier, runs a far more regimented life than anything Heidi has known, and Heidi's homesickness for the mountains grows severe enough that she is eventually sent home. Clara later visits Heidi in the Alps herself, and the mountain air, the goat's milk, and one dramatic moment in which the jealous Peter pushes her empty wheelchair down the slope in a fit of anger, force Clara to attempt walking on her own for the first time, an effort that succeeds, and the two families end the book bound together, with Heidi's grandfather welcomed back fully into the village he had long kept at arm's length.

Spyri writes the mountain scenes with real tenderness, contrasting the health and openness of Heidi's Alpine life against the confinement of the city almost as a direct argument for the first over the second, and the book's warmth comes through even in translation, which is likely why it has been rendered into English at least thirteen separate times since it first appeared. It reads simply and moves quickly, built for a young reader, and its Alpine setting has stayed vivid enough that the region around it now markets itself to visitors under the book's own name.