This book aims to analyse and investigate the influence of characters from children's suspense, adventure and romance books on the development of the socio-emotional skills of children in a 4th grade class in a private school in a municipality in the Vale dos Sinos. This study will highlight the contribution of children's literature to giving meaning to children's lives, as well as exposing the contributions of some characters to the cognitive and psychological development of students. Socio-emotional skills serve as a guiding thread throughout the work, in the sense of individual and collective management of emotions and the perception of how they influence the identification of child readers with the characters in children's stories. All of this is based on a dialogue with theorists in the field of children's literature and those who study the development of socio-emotional skills in educational spaces.