Anonymous




Shannon Hale- Princess Academy and Goose Girl and it sequels

Penderwicks series by Jean Birdsall

Jessica Day George also has a spinoff of fairy tales that starts with the 12 dancing princesses called Princess at the Midnight Ball

ED Baker has a number of fairy tale based books similar type content to the Jessica Day George books

Rebecca Stead's books are clever and aimed at early middle school age.

Flora and Ulysses is more a 4th & 5th grade audience but a wonderful book

For more realistic fiction - Wonder, Rules, Counting Sevens and One and Only Ivan, Island of Blue Dolphin, Witch of Blackbird Pond

More adventure/fantasy side - Mysterious Benedict Society, Septemus Heap Series, Inccouragble Children of Ashton Place, Series of Unfortunate Events, Theodosia series, Kronos Chronicles (these are just awsome, one of my favorite)

Mysteries - Enola Holmes Series, Flavia DeLuce books by Bradley, Girl with Silver Eyes

Anonymous wrote:Books I loved at that age:

A Tree Grows in Brooklyn
Bridge to Terabithia
Lloyd Alexander's fantasy novels
Robin McKinley's Beauty and The Door in the Hedge
The Narnia Series
The Witch of Blackbird Pond
Summer of My German Soldier
The Westing Game
Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry
The Secret Garden
Number the Stars
Sadako and the Thousand Paper Cranes
Homecoming/Dicey's Song
Across Five Aprils

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:To Kill a Mockingbird
Watership Down
Animal Farm
Willa Cather novels, especially My Antonia and O Pioneers
The Giver and its sequels
A Wrinkle in Time, to be followed by When You Reach Me
The Book Thief
The Green Glass Sea
Al Capone Does My Shirts (and its sequels)

How on earth is an 11-year-old girl in the US in 2014 going to make the least bit of sense of Animal Farm?

Did you read the list OP posted of the books her daughter has read? If she's read Fahrenheit 451, she's not going to have a problem with Animal Farm (or 1984 for that matter). My 3 kids read it between ages 11-13 and got a lot out of it.

NP here. Agreed. I read Animal Farm at 12 and while I'm sure I missed some stuff, I got enough out of it to successfully use it as one of two main supporting points on an SAT essay in 8th grade and get full marks, so I don't think reading it around that age is completely unreasonable.

Anonymous wrote:I can't imagine any 11-year-old, no matter how precocious, reading One Hundred Years of Solitude. And The Crying of Lot 49? Good heavens. Why not just give the poor child Ulysses?

Anonymous wrote:So I was raiding my parents' John Updike and James Baldwin at age 12. I will not suggest those, although my mother did an admirable job restraining herself when she found me reading them.

But how about:

Hemingway: The Sun Also Rises

Steinback: The Pearl, others

Hilton: Lost Horizon

Crane: The Red Badge of Courage

London: The Call of the Wild

Evelyn Waugh: Scoop, Brideshead Revisited

Graham Greene: Travels With My Aunt

Buck: The Good Earth

Pynchon: The Crying of Lot 49

Marquez: 100 Years of Solitude

Salinger: Catcher in the Rye

Huxley: Brave New World

Orwell: 1984

Barrie: Peter Pan

Kipling: The Jungle Books, Kim

McCullers: The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, The Member of the Wedding

Fitzgerald: The Great Gatsby

West: Day of the Locust

Forster: A Passage to India

Nabokov: Pnin

Tarkington: The Magnificent Ambersons

Joyce: A Portrait of the Artist As a Young Man

Griffin: Black Like Me

Adams: Watership Down

Card: Ender's Game

Thomas: A Child's Christmas in Wales

Hammet: The Thin Man

Doyle: The Hound of the Baskervilles, others

Dumas: The Count of Monte Christo, The Three Musketeers

Hugo: The Hunchback of Notre Dame

Verne: Around the World in 80 Days, others

Anonymous: A Thousand and One Nights

Shelley: Frankenstein

White: The Once and Future King

Wells: Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, The Invisible Man

Stevenson: Treasure Island, Kidnapped


If she hasn't read Herge's entire Tintin oeuvre, she must.

Anonymous wrote:the whole Wizard of Oz series
Judy Blume's preteen books
the Anastasia series by Lois Lowry
taking care of terrific by Lois Lowry
Nancy Drew!
Gone Away Lake
The Saturdays and the other books in that series
Half Magic and the others from that series
Witch of Blackbird Pond an Calico Captive
The Mary Poppins books

I think I read Gone With the Wind and the Bronte's when I was 12...

Anonymous wrote:I realize I'm straying from the topic since it's not a classic, but Peak by Roland Smith. How about My Daniel by Pam Conrad? I also suggest getting her a subscription to a literary magazine. When I was a kid I really liked Cheaper by the Dozen by Gilbreth.

Anonymous wrote:For Great Expectations -- partly because Nicholas Nickleby is very funny, and partly because the themes and characters in Nicholas Nickleby are less complex. (And partly because I don't like Great Expectations very much, whereas I like Nicholas Nickleby a lot!)

For A Tale of Two Cities -- because it's tendentious, all of the characters are cardboard, and there are far better books by Dickens (including Great Expectations).