The Little Princess, by Frances Hodgson Burnett is the all-time great fantasy book for little girls. Big girls, too. It's a classic riches to rags to riches story and like The Count of Monte Cristo, the all-time great revenge novel, it never ceases to satisfy.
Our heroine is placed in a girl's school by her father, a very rich British civil servant in India. Then he dies and she is thought to be penniless and is treated badly. But no, it turns out, she is really fabulously wealthy and her father's best friend has been wearing himself to a frazzle trying to find her.
Found she is and the book ends with her happily ensconced in the home of this man whom she had never met before her father died. And disturbingly, she doesn't seem to miss her father all that much now that she has another rich man to buy clothes and dolls for her.
Well, we won't dwell on that part of the story. The rest of it is pure and delightful fantasy. A mysterious Indian servant turns her gloomy garret into a little nest with rugs and a fire and a folding camp chair. Lovely clothes arrive mysteriously in the mail. And there's a rambunctious monkey who plays a significant part in the plot. I've always liked that monkey.
Burnett also wrote what may be my favorite children's book, The Secret Garden.