Below is the complete list of Max and Martha Children’s books in order of publication. This is the recommended reading sequence for the series by Danielle Steel.
Max & Martha Children’s Series
- Martha’s New Daddy (1989)
Book details - Max and the Baby-sitter (1989)
Book details - Martha’s Best Friend (1989)
Book details - Max’s Daddy Goes to the Hospital (1989)
Book details - Max’s New Baby (1989)
Book details - Martha’s New School (1989)
Book details - Max Runs Away (1990)
Book details - Martha’s New Puppy (1990)
Book details - Max and Grandpa and Grandpa Winky (1991)
Book details - Martha and Hilary and the Stranger (1991)
Book details
About Max and Martha Children’s Series
Danielle Steel’s Max & Martha books occupy a very different place in her bibliography from the adult relationship novels that made her famous. This is a children’s series, written for younger readers, and it is built around ordinary family and childhood experiences rather than romance, glamour, or sweeping adult drama. That difference matters immediately. Max & Martha is not a miniature version of Steel’s adult fiction. It is a short, issue-centered children’s line about two young children navigating everyday changes that can feel enormous at that age.
The series is best understood as a thematic children’s sequence rather than a tightly plotted continuing story. Max and Martha are recurring child figures, but the books do not depend on one long narrative arc that becomes more complicated from volume to volume. Instead, each title takes a specific childhood situation and turns it into the center of the story. That structure is what gives the series its usefulness and identity. The books are designed to help young readers recognize feelings they may already have but may not yet know how to name clearly.
That approach can be seen in the subjects the series takes on. Titles such as Martha’s New Daddy, Max and the Baby-sitter, Max’s Daddy Goes to the Hospital, Max’s New Baby, and Martha’s New School show how directly the books focus on common disruptions in a child’s world. These are not fantasy adventures or comic escapades built around novelty for its own sake. They are stories about divorce, remarriage, illness, new siblings, new schools, friendship, fear, and unfamiliar people or situations. The scale is small in adult terms, but that is exactly the point. For the children at the center of the books, those changes are life-sized.
Publication order still matters, even though the series is not heavily plot-driven, because it shows how the books were originally framed and how the Max and Martha concept unfolded. The sequence alternates between the two child leads, which gives the series a balanced feel. Rather than building everything around one recurring hero, Steel uses both Max and Martha to reflect slightly different domestic situations and emotional responses. That alternating structure helps keep the books from feeling repetitive. It also makes the series seem broader than a single-character line, because it can move between different family arrangements and different kinds of childhood anxiety.
One of the most interesting things about Max & Martha is how openly practical it is. These books are not trying to dazzle. They are trying to reassure, explain, and normalize. That gives them a clear place in Danielle Steel’s career. They show her working not as a novelist of adult emotional crisis, but as a writer interested in helping children through moments of confusion, insecurity, and adjustment. The emotional register is simpler than in her adult fiction, but the underlying concern is familiar: how people cope when family life changes shape around them.
Because the series is made up of short, focused books, it also has a clean, approachable structure for parents, teachers, or librarians. A reader does not need to commit to a large fictional world to get value from it. Each book can address one immediate concern, while the full set gives a wider picture of childhood transition. That makes the series feel more like a library of emotional situations than a conventional long-running children’s saga.
Taken as a whole, the Max & Martha books are best understood as Danielle Steel’s practical, empathetic children’s series: a set of short books about young children facing the kinds of family and social changes that are ordinary in life but often overwhelming in experience. The reading order is straightforward, but the real value of the series lies in its purpose. These books are there to make difficult moments feel less lonely, and that is what gives them their lasting shape.