Everybody loves a talented child—with the exception, of course, of his or her siblings and peers. A gifted child provides a feel-good subject for most readers, and sensitive child prodigies battling unfair odds are somehow especially appealing. Think David, in his fight against Goliath. Or Frodo in his battle with Sauron. The abilities of the kids in the following novels run the gamut from chess to music to sports to a sort of overall intelligence.

Beth Harmon, the eight-year-old heroine of The Queen’s Gambit, has one talent: chess. During her spectacular rise from her first game to the U.S. Open Championship, Beth struggles with all sorts of inner and outer challenges. The author is Walter Tevis, who is probably best known for his novel The Hustler (but who is also the author of The Man Who Fell to Earth, The Color of Money, and Mockingbird).

• Read one of these books? Post a comment.

• Recommend another book featuring child prodigies!

Helen DeWitt tells the story of Ludo, a young genius, in her first novel, The Last Samurai, vividly evoking the odd relationship between Ludo and his rather strange mother, Sibylla, as well as Ludo’s urgent search for his real father.

In Myla Goldberg’s Bee Season, nine-year-old Eliza Nauman, an indifferent student at best, surprises her family with her amazing skill at spelling—but her talent ultimately unravels the tenuous strands that are holding her family together and causes her father, a cantor, to question his faith in God.

In My Name Is Asher Lev, Chaim Potok traces the young and brilliant artist Asher Lev’s struggle between his religious life in the cloistered Hasidic community in post–World War II Brooklyn and his compulsive need to paint what he sees in the world around him.

Children of the Atom by Wilmar Shiras is about a group of lonely teenagers with preternaturally high IQs, the result of a nuclear accident that claimed the lives of their parents and left them as infants destined to be geniuses. Watching these young people gather and form new relationships with each other and with the outside world is both heart-wrenching and heartwarming, particularly for anyone who ever felt out of place or “different” as a child.

Rose Tremain’s The Way I Found Her describes the eventful thirteenth summer of Lewis Little, who becomes involved in the life of the oh-so-beautiful and mysterious Valentina Gavrilovich, the best-selling Russian émigré author whose book his mother has come to France to translate.