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Alicorn comments on [Book Suggestions] Summer Reading for Younglings. - Less Wrong
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Comments (78)
Fablehaven by Brandon Mull.
Anything Tamora Pierce; I'm partial to the Circle of Magic but you could start her in Tortall just as well.
His Dark Materials by Philip Pullman.
Enchanted Forest Chronicles by Patricia C. Wrede.
Ella Enchanted by Gail Carson Levine.
Sophie's World by Jostein Gaarder
Sharon Shinn (not arbitrary books, some of them have a touch of adult content, particularly avoid Wrapt in Crystal and Heart of Gold until she's a bit older; I recommend Archangel in another comment and that's a fine starting point but I think Safe-Keeper's Secret and sequels are best optimized for a kid)
Possibly Zenna Henderson. Mix of fantasy and sci-fi flavors but with a very consistent, distinctive aesthetic throughout; if you like one Zenna Henderson story you'll probably like them all. Vaguely religious sentiments, but coated in enough speculative fiction stuff to be even less problematic than Narnia.
I assume she's already read Harry Potter? That, if not.
Watership Down by Richard Adams is good and is about bunnies. I'm really not sure if I'd classify it as "fantasy". I mean, it's about intelligent bunnies, but they just talk to each other and other animals, they don't communicate with humans or do magic or anything. But it's good.
Michael Ende - Neverending Story and Momo are both available in English.
Avoid Piers Anthony. Piers Anthony exists to be the only available speculative fiction with a kid-accessible writing style in libraries run by people with no taste; saturate her with anything but and perhaps she will never be driven to read his crap.
Agreed on Watership Down-- it might be marginally fantasy because there's a small amount of ESP.
And also agreed about Zenna Henderson.
More on the fantasy front-- McKillip's The Riddlemaster of Hed. I'd say the first book is much better than the sequels, but the sequels still have some good stuff in them.
Ferrett Steinmetz's "Saurkraut Station" is excellent YA science fiction.
The McKillip is fantastic. I enjoyed that plenty as an adult as well!
Seconded.
Totally thirded. Great read with a likeable female protagonist and full of interesting ideas. Pullman has a strong anti-religion message (R.t. Gur yrnq punenpgref xvyy tbq gb chg uvz bhg bs uvf zvfrel) but that comes second to the art of story-telling and never feels forced.
Hmm, it felt pretty forced to me, especially in the third book. So I guess your mileage may vary.
Now I think about it, I managed to read all the Narnia books without ever noticing the Christian undertones, so I'm probably not a good guide to these things
Finally noticing the Christian allegory, around the age of twelve, ruined the Chronicles of Narnia for me when it had been one of my favorite series as a kid.
I didn't notice the Christian allegory (I wasn't brought up Christian) until I had it explicitly pointed out to me, and even then, it struck me as being so off-base that I couldn't imagine being convinced by it. (The dwarves with their eyes shut--the people who refuse to integrate readily available empirical evidence when it might change their minds about something, those are supposed to be atheists?)
I find it doubtful that C. S. Lewis ever intended it to be convincing. He wanted it to function as a fantasy story, but I think he also wanted it to resonate with people who buy into the Christian myth, and to make people who don't think "Huh, so this thrilling fantasy story is something that all ties into Christian belief? I'd be interested in learning more about that then."
When I realized what it was supposed to be an allegory for, though, I was hit by a wave of plot elements I'd always accepted as perfectly sensible fantasy elements which suddenly struck me as crashingly wrong. It was like Hirou's revelation in The Sword of Good. Like when, just a few chapters earlier (I was rereading Prince Caspian, at the part where Aslan tells Peter and Susan that they won't be able to return to Narnia and would have to come to know him in their own world, and it finally hit me that he was supposed to be Jesus,) Lucy had asked Aslan why he couldn't simply raise up an army and crush Miraz like he did with the White Witch, and Aslan said something like "Child, don't you know such things are never done the same way twice?" I wanted to shout at him, "Why!? Justify yourself to me, Aslan!" The bottom dropped out of the plot and everything started to seem arbitrary and unnecessary; Aslan has the power to solve every problem, he has absolutely no need for the protagonists, has no comprehensible reason for selecting them out of the entire world population to fill their spots in the song and dance he's orchestrated, and the entire structure of the plot is determined by some set of supernatural laws or requirements which are completely opaque to the reader.
C. S. Lewis wrote that an allegory should be able to stand on its own merits as a narrative, but once I turned a more critical eye to it, I was overwhelmed by the degree to which the Chronicles of Narnia failed to do so. The grand structure of the plot rests entirely on authorial fiat, rather than any comprehensible chain of cause and effect. The offensiveness of some of the story elements (such as the Calormenes almost all being unwitting devil worshipers,) was overshadowed by the pointlessness of it all.
His message was unforced in the first book, occasionally clumsy in the second, and completely and utterly anvilicious in the third, to the point where it obliterated all pretense of narrative or character development.
I always feel a sense of what almost feels like betrayal when I read these kinds of books -- be it by Pullman, or Ursula LeGuin, or Neal Stephenson. Here is an author who obviously can write extremely well, based on his past works; and yet he chooses to write poorly as a tradeoff, in order to push his message... But there was no need for a tradeoff ! Writing is not a zero-sum game !
Bah ! The first book in the series was great. The second one was ok. The third one was what felt like 500 pages of non-stop didactic moralizing. In the unlikely event that I ever meet Pullman, I would love to remind him that this kind of heavy-handed anvil-dropping didn't work for C.S.Lewis, and it doesn't work for Pullman, either. Bah I say !
I read it when I was an adult, and it almost gave me nightmares. It's a great book, don't get me wrong, but...
I upvoted your post just for that. Makes up for the Pullman thing.
Secretly, it's also about people :D
http://27.media.tumblr.com/tumblrkyvtdcgf6V1qaqtpfo1500.png. Also, I don't like this book. As a substitute, how about those Garth Nix books?
Those Garth Nix books are great, but not at all similar to Sophie's World. I would recommend both (although if I had to pick one, Garth Nix all the way)
Garth Nix books are quite good, though I'd avoid Shade's Children. It might be inappropriate for a 5th grader.
Why don't you like Sophie's World?
Oh, the whole philosophy-as-magic thing.
Seconded Circle of Magic, His Dark Materials, and Enchanted Forest Chronicles.
Do you generally dislike Piers Anthony, or do you specifically anti-recommend him in this situation? I enjoyed Incarnations of Immortality and the first few Xanth books, but I don't really think they would be age-appropriate.
I generally dislike Piers Anthony and particularly disrecommend him in the case of an elementary school girl. He has some interesting content. I own some of his books, and have read many more. But he wraps up his worldbuilding concepts and his plot notions in repulsive sexism (against both sexes) and barely passable writing/characterization and gratuitous Author Appeal gimmicks.
I would go even further. I don't think that he has any interesting content, either. What he has is a lot of puns. That's enough for a stand-up comic routine, but not enough for a book.
His content is not well presented, but that doesn't mean that telepathic horses and all the myriad Xanth talents and amoeba people etc. etc. are intrinsically uninteresting. (Please mind you are talking to the person who wrote more than 500,000 words of Twilight fanfiction without changing any established worldbuilding. Salvageability of ideas is so different from quality of packaging.)
I know, I'd read your fanfiction and I enjoyed it :-)
I think you and I just have different definitions of "content". As far as I can tell, you use the word to mean "interesting ideas that could be used as building blocks for a compelling narrative", whereas I use the word to mean "the finished narrative". I could agree that Piers Anthony has some interesting ideas, though not all of his ideas are interesting, IMO.
Having read Piers Anthony as an elementary school girl, I can attest that he may screw kids up.