I'm sure there are exceptions, but it's generally the case that while girls will read books and watch movies about boys, boys don't return the favor. And they're missing out on so much.
Growing up, I spent so many hours with stories of other little girls growing up in different times and places.
The Little House books obviously have to come toward the top of any list of books in this category. The Ingalls family's journey from the Big Woods of Wisconsin through Kansas and Minnesota and ultimately to South Dakota is a window onto so many aspects of life in the woods and prairie (obviously), in small towns and on homesteads. Hunting, farming, making clothes, getting an education -- and having fun as a child and a teenager -- it's all in there, in vivid but not pedantic detail.
In Understood Betsy, another little girl learns many of these same skills living on a Vermont farm. Orphaned Elizabeth Ann arrives in Putney a sheltered city child feeling abandoned and aghast at her life having been turned upside down and becomes Betsy, self-reliant and resourceful.
In Understood Betsy, Betsy essentially takes a step back in time. Her relatives in the country have never seen a paved road being put down, which is a familiar sight to her (though she hasn't observed closely enough to be able to tell them how it's done). Where butter comes from is in turn a mystery to her, but she quickly learns to churn it.
That quick change in the technologies in use and the lives being lived by people in different areas is so striking in these books. Roller Skates and the Betsy-Tacy books take place not so very long after the Little House books, but the lives lived in them are a world away. Lucinda in Roller Skates is a wealthy New Yorker given the freedom of the city for a year she spends living with a teacher while her parents are in Italy. Wandering on her roller skates, she misbehaves and makes friends outside her restrictive class boundaries. It's a gorgeous picture of a girl who wants more than she's allowed and the social world she creates around her deisires -- and of 1890s New York City.
The Betsy-Tacy books start out just before Betsy's fifth birthday and carry through to the early days of her marriage. Set in Minnesota (Mankato, more or less), the series shows her lifelong ambition to write, her high school crushes, the arrival of cars (and the endless pain in the ass of flat tires and breakdowns in those early days), and most of all her sustaining friendships with Tacy and Tib (the latter of whom shows up in the second book). For the anti-immigrant crowd, Betsy in Spite of Herself has Betsy visit Tib's German-speaking family in Milwaukee.
I don't know if children lose themselves more intensely in books than adults do, but the worlds these books conjure for me are still so, so vivid, dozens of re-reads later. What childhood favorites still move you as an adult?
Also on my favorites list:
Emily of New Moon appears to be more difficult to get a copy of, but I always preferred it to L.M. Montgomery's more famous Anne of Green Gables books.
The Wolves of Willoughby Chase, by Joan Aiken
A Girl of the Limberlost, by Gene Stratton-Porter