Edumacating My Child

June 7, 2018 6:58 AM

I have an amazing 12-year-old son finishing grade 7 who loves to read YA dystopian literature like The Hunger Games and lots of sort of media tie-in books. He is capable of grappling with big ideas. Please help me come up with some really well-written, engaging books that use language beautifully, classic texts welcome if they are not sexist, that we can read together over the summer for our new Family Book Club.

Some additional notes, although all suggestions are welcome.
- He hates to write and his grammar is atrocious, which is one reason for the emphasis on good writing.
- He recently has become an avid D&D player.
- His school's choice of literature and teaching has been not-great (their big novel study was Wonder, fine, but not exactly a high-level text.)
- He also needs rich ideas to help his mind continue to fight patriarchy - peer discussion is starting to get pretty awful.
-When I talked to him about what he would like to buy/read next he said Twilight...augh. I haven't decided on Twilight yet (we tend to steer away rather than ban books) but as a bonus, if anyone knows an age-appropriate not-too-sexy vampire series that would be kind of awesome.
- I think I have a few future YA series wrapped up for him like The Raven Boys but suggestions are welcome
- We've read Narnia and The Hobbit and A Wrinkle in Time already as a matter of course.

Thank you!

posted by warriorqueen to Media & Arts (42 answers total)

Check out William Sleator, I really enjoyed The Boy who Reversed Himself at that age, also it taught me a lot about higher dimensional geometry, and helped foster my lifelong interest in math.

Along those lines, the original I, Robot anthology is wonderful for young brains, disguising logic puzzles as adventures in fixing robots around the solar system (Azimov is justly criticized for flat characters but he is still a solid writer, and reading his works can be very rewarding).
posted by SaltySalticid at 7:07 AM on June 7, 2018 [3 favorites]

Ian McDonald's Everness books are pretty enjoyable, in a sort of Philip Pullman vein.
posted by pipeski at 7:08 AM on June 7, 2018

LJ Smith's Nightworld is a nice antidote to Twilight (and actually predates it). Vampire romances where consent is emphasized; one book has a girl waiting to become a vampire until after she goes to college. Mercedes Lackey is another fantasy author who puts big emphasis on feminism, consent, and diversity. Tamora Pierce.

However, I wouldn't worry too much about his media tie-in habit. I had one too, and am now a writer with a graduate degree in writing. The most important thing is that he reads for pleasure, which it sounds like you have covered already.
posted by PhoBWanKenobi at 7:10 AM on June 7, 2018 [1 favorite]

Alan Mendelsohn, the Boy from Mars, by Daniel Pinkwater, blew my mind at around that age.
posted by JamesBay at 7:10 AM on June 7, 2018 [3 favorites]

Watership Down
posted by supermedusa at 7:11 AM on June 7, 2018 [2 favorites]

Response by poster: Me too PhoBWanKenobi, although in my case former editor and current aspiring writer, so no worries there - I just want to broaden the range. These suggestions are all fantastic, please keep them coming.
posted by warriorqueen at 7:12 AM on June 7, 2018

The Discworld books.
posted by Lyn Never at 7:17 AM on June 7, 2018 [8 favorites]

"Eleanor & Park" by Rainbow Rowell - talks about a high school relationship between Eleanor who comes from a rough home life and Park who comes from a comfortable home life

"Carry On" by Rainbow Rowell is like a Harry Potter fanfic with a vampire and "FANGIRL" by Rainbow Rowell is about the young adult who *writes* that Harry Potter fanfic

"I'll Give You The Sun" by Jandy Nelson - talks about teen twins, growing up, love, divorce, family, art

"Starglass" by MeFi's own Phoebe North - a space ship flying from a dying Earth to a new planet with intrigue, upheaval, friendships, love, class struggles

And I still love the Harper Hall YA trilogy by Anne McCaffrey about DRAGONS on a different planet
posted by jillithd at 7:18 AM on June 7, 2018 [5 favorites]

He recently has become an avid D&D player.
Not exactly YA but RA Salvatore has many books set in the Forgotten Realms, which is a primary/default setting for D&D.
The Icewind Dale trilogy is the place to start. It does feature some pretty violent e.g. giant slaying, so you may want to pre-screen if you're worried about that. But he'll probably love it.
Thinking back, I read far more generic sci-fi and fantasy at that age than stuff billed as YA.
Pern books would be a way to get in some classic dragon fun by a woman author.
Also +1 for the first few Discworld books, they are hilarious though some of the humor will go over his head.
posted by SaltySalticid at 7:19 AM on June 7, 2018

The Hate U Give, while about young woman is definitely more thematically focused on race than gender. T.H.U.G is explicitly YA and deals with some serious contemporary issues in thoughtful nuanced ways given its intended audience. Highly recommended, although its heavy (police/domestic violence).
posted by Exceptional_Hubris at 7:22 AM on June 7, 2018 [3 favorites]

Sherlock Holmes could be a good choice here. Maybe start with some of the short stories, then work up to The Hound of the Baskervilles?

(A Study in Scarlet is an interesting origin story, but really demonizes the Mormons for some reason; The Sign of the Four is tied up with British India, and I don’t remember how problematic it might be.)
posted by Huffy Puffy at 7:23 AM on June 7, 2018

Be really careful about what Mercedes Lackey books you give to a kid, she has a tendency to have her villains be serial rapists/torturers.

I wonder if Sarah Rees Brennan's In Other Lands is too old for him--there is some consensual sex in it. But has a d&d fun fantasy setting Carry On sort of vibe. I am making my book club read it and so far everyone is really into it.

The first two books in Scarlett Thomas' Worldquake series might be fun, set in our world if a worldquake happened and we lost most technology, also there is magic and magical books and lots of kids making friends and working as a team and having magical adventures. They're great.
posted by leesh at 7:25 AM on June 7, 2018

Might go for Neil Gaiman like Stardust or Neverwhere. I don't think either of those are too advanced for a reading 12 year old.
posted by mark k at 7:25 AM on June 7, 2018 [4 favorites]

My teenage daughter loved Virginia Bergin's H20 and its sequel The Storm. I read them too and thought they were well-written compared to a lot of YA books.
posted by Redstart at 7:26 AM on June 7, 2018

If he's interested in vampires, he might like the Abhorsen series by Garth Nix. The first book (Sabriel) is about an 18 year old girl who becomes a necromancer, but instead of raising the dead, her job is to make sure dead creatures stay dead. The rest of the books generally involve young people dealing with magic and battling the undead. It's a YA series but I still enjoy reading the books today. The female protagonists are well written and there's some great world building.

Otherwise the Earthsea series by Ursula K. Le Guin and His Dark Materials by Philip Pullman are my standard recommendations for fantasy lovers in middle school. I started reading all of these around age 12 - 13.
posted by castlebravo at 7:35 AM on June 7, 2018 [8 favorites]

I love Earthsea so much, and it seems weird saying this about Le Guin, but it is super sexist. Women's magic is weak and evil. (This gets retconned after the third book, but IMO unconvincingly -- the later books just don't work as a description of the same world as the first three for me.) That doesn't mean don't read them, but I wouldn't go to them as non-sexist.
posted by LizardBreath at 7:41 AM on June 7, 2018 [1 favorite]

The Books of Ember by Jeanne DuPrau
A Handful of Time by Kit Pearson
His Dark Materials series by Philip Pullman
If he enjoyed A Wrinkle in Time, I'd also suggest reading the all of the books inThe Time Quintet in the series as well
posted by OnefortheLast at 7:41 AM on June 7, 2018 [1 favorite]

My son (a little older) just loved a brand-new dystopian novel, Mayfly by Jeff Sweat. Female protagonist, and the "what if" scenario is "What if some biological illness killed all the adults, and then killed kids when they got to be about 17. What would life be like a couple of decades after that?"
posted by BlahLaLa at 7:48 AM on June 7, 2018

Also the thing about Twilight is that it's not very sexy. It was written by a religious person, and it's kind of clear from the get-go (to an adult reader, anyway) that no sexytimes are going to be happening any time soon. There's a lot of teen-level longing and feelings, but very little sex.
posted by BlahLaLa at 7:49 AM on June 7, 2018 [1 favorite]

I was about that age (maybe a tad younger) when I started reading Discworld novels. The first one I read was Small Gods, which "satirises religious institutions, people, and practices, and the role of religion in political life" (Wikipedia's description).
posted by EndsOfInvention at 8:00 AM on June 7, 2018

I mostly just want to nth His Dark Materials. I read it in... college? I think, and badly wish I had read it at his age. You don't really get much more smash-the-patriarchy than that in YA.

How do you think the surreal would capture him? Murakami (Kafka on the Shore is another I wish I had read younger) and Borges (a major segment of a high school literature class believe it or not) come to mind.
posted by supercres at 8:01 AM on June 7, 2018 [2 favorites]

Seconding the Abhorsen series. And Discworld (particularly the YA, Tiffany Aching sub-series).

Also:
The Blue Sword and The Hero & the Crown duet by Robin McKinley.
The Lost Conspiracy by Frances Hardinge (standalone).
The Graceling series by Kristin Cashore.
posted by ClingClang at 8:05 AM on June 7, 2018 [1 favorite]

The Shipbreaker series by Paolo Bacigalupi is perfect!

It's a dystopian YA series set in a future New Orleans and USA that has been devastated by climate change (a big theme of a lot of his work), where people struggle to make a living salvaging old ships.
posted by brookeb at 8:25 AM on June 7, 2018

(A Study in Scarlet is an interesting origin story, but really demonizes the Mormons for some reason; The Sign of the Four is tied up with British India, and I don’t remember how problematic it might be.)

AF. AF. There's a lot of casual colonialism in ACD, and the underlying view of women's proper role in society is antiquated, though there's not much in the way of casual misogyny as there is racism. I would hesitate to give these books to a kid who already seemed a little shaky on social issues.

Code Name Verity, but be prepared to break out the tissues at the end.

In terms of his writing, since you mention D&D, I bet he has some stories going in his own head. Have you considered encouraging him to write them down? I mean, including stories about characters in the books he likes, or about his D&D characters. Nothing to encourage developing writing skills like wanting to be able to tell your own story.
posted by praemunire at 8:26 AM on June 7, 2018

You don't mention Harry Potter. Is there any chance he hasn't read Harry Potter? If so, then that, definitely that.

Another one that came to mind was Holes. The movie is actually pretty great, too, if he enjoys having that tie-in.
posted by mosst at 8:29 AM on June 7, 2018

The Book Thief, even though it's historical fiction rather than SF/F (aside from the identity of the narrator), but I think Nazi Germany qualifies as a dystopia. The main character is a girl. There was also a movie adaptation which didn't get as much attention as it deserved.
posted by DevilsAdvocate at 10:24 AM on June 7, 2018 [3 favorites]

I also liked The Boy Who Reversed Himself.

The Hatchet series is also classic.

My favorite author as a kid was Zilpha Keatley Snyder. Her books are very well-written and often have a magical element. The Headless Cupid and the rest of the Stanley books are a good start.
posted by radioamy at 10:25 AM on June 7, 2018 [2 favorites]

These are some books my 12- year-old daughter has enjoyed:

Greenglass House by Kate Milford incorporates an RPG into the story. There's also a sequel, Ghosts of Greenglass House.

Warcross by Marie Lu is about an online game tournament. She also did the Legend dystopia series.

Scythe by Neal Shusterman is set in a world which has conquered death and a benevolent AI is in control, but a small group of Scythes must end lives to keep the population under control. There are two books out and a third is coming.

Jonathan Stroud has two excellent series: Bartimaeus and Lockwood & Co. Bartimaeus is a delightfully snarky djinn who is called by a young boy who is studying magic. Lockwood & Co. is about teenage ghost-hunters; only children and teens can see the spirits, so they are the only ones who can fight them.

The Leviathan books by Scott Westerfeld are a steampunk-y alternate history set during WWI.
posted by mogget at 10:35 AM on June 7, 2018

Archivist Wasp is a terrific book. More post-apocalyptic than dystopian, but definitely unique. No sex (no romantic relationship for the main character at all, which is a novelty in YA), no vampires, but supersoldier ghosts. And Amazon tells me there's a sequel coming next month and I usually hate sequels but I'm so excited now.

Also, it's been a while since I read The Coldest Girl in Coldtown so I don't remember how much sex is in it, but it's a sort of dystopia with vampires.

And Sally Green's Half Bad series is a good read. It's set in a world where there are highly segregated white and black witches (magic, not color), and the main character is a boy who has one parent of each and is therefore considered a danger to society as he's coming of age/into his full witch power. It's definitely a dystopia, though presented in a way that the main character discovers that fact along the way (hint: the "white" witches are not the good guys they pretend to be).
posted by camyram at 10:42 AM on June 7, 2018

Daniel José Older's Shadowshaper. He's maybe a tad young, but it might be fine.
posted by The corpse in the library at 10:52 AM on June 7, 2018

The Tripods series
posted by metasarah at 11:52 AM on June 7, 2018

Susan Cooper - The Dark is Rising, magical, structured, hallucinogenic...
if he enjoys that, the rest of the sequence is great, especially The Grey King.


Alan Garner - The Owl Service and Elinor.

Diane Wynne Jones - Chrestomanci series.
posted by tardigrade at 2:00 PM on June 7, 2018 [3 favorites]

Megan Whalen Turner's Queen's Thief series: The Thief (middle-grade), followed by the more YA-ish The Queen of Attolia, The King of Attolia, A Conspiracy of Kings, and Thick as Thieves. They're a fantasy-ish series set in an alternative Greek/Mediterranean/Byzantine world, and are beautifully written but still a great deal of fun, especially if you like clever plans, capers, unreliable narrators, and good twists. There's a moderate amount of violence (certainly not any worse than the Hunger Games) but it's not treated casually or carelessly, and some romance but nothing sexually explicit. While the main series protagonist and the majority of the PoV characters are male, the main female characters are powerful and interesting and fully human. The plots are engaging and fun but there's a lot of deeper thematic stuff under the surface, about faith and love and justice and duty and forgiveness and human capacity for change. I can't recommend them enough.
posted by karayel at 2:36 PM on June 7, 2018 [4 favorites]

For encouraging grammar and other writing skills, I'd recommend fanfic. Part of the problem with kids learning to write is that they never seen the process between "I have no idea how to make these words put pictures in people's heads" and "whoa, this book makes me feel like I'm living on another planet."

I've known several parents whose children's writing improved when they started reading fanfiction.net - because all of a sudden, they can see what "good idea with bad writing" looks like. They find out what bad characterization looks like when they say, "but he would never do that!" They get a sense of why grammar and good phrasing are important because they see what happens when it fails - only seeing well-written books may not give them a sense of how their writing could get to that point.
posted by ErisLordFreedom at 3:04 PM on June 7, 2018 [5 favorites]

You could try McKinley's Sunshine as a vampire novel, although maybe you should read it first to decide if it's too adult. I think less *happens* than in Twilight, but the characters are more real so it might be more affecting. Really good book.

Gillian Bradshaw? The Sand-Reckoner for reading together, and she has several specifically YA books.

Slightly different approach: read history books or National Geographic together, and use them to make up stories or just re-set stories you all know and play with how they change. Over dinner cleanup, or on roadtrips, maybe. Can Huck Finn go down the Nile? If Joseph and Mary were caught on the Penna Pike, where would they go instead of a barn? That goes along with ErisLordFreedom's recommendation of fanfic.
posted by clew at 3:37 PM on June 7, 2018

Response by poster: You guys are so awesome! We are making a list. He's starting with Young Wizards.

Not to threadsit but just a few responses for posterity and loop-closing.

I don't object to the pretty vampires or the low-grade sexual references in Twilight but their creepy passivity/stalkery bits. It's finding other ones that aren't like - Laurell K. Hamilton, so thank you for the leads!

I used to be a massive Pern fan but the Suck Fairy came. :( But I might un-box the Harper Hall books.

The idea to write D&D fiction is great but he makes his own stop-motion animation videos of his inner world and I have been reluctant to push too hard on the writing angle. I will think about the fanfic idea, it's really intriguing.

He has read Harry Potter and the Tripods trilogy so those were great picks.

Thank you thank you thank you!
posted by warriorqueen at 6:46 PM on June 7, 2018

For YA dystopia, as a kid I really enjoyed the Shadow Children series by Margaret Peterson Haddix. And for fantasy, the Circle of Magic quartet by Tamora Pierce was a great read as well.
posted by lesser weasel at 7:26 PM on June 7, 2018

You mentioned Wm Sleator, has he read Interstellar Pig?

How about Scott Westerfield’s Uglies series?

M. T. Anderson’s Feed, and his Octavian Nothing books, and his remarkable new novel Landscape With Invisible Hand.
posted by nicwolff at 10:00 PM on June 7, 2018

Came in to make sure His Dark Materials got a mention. It came to mind immediately when I read your question. I also saw a couple of people mention Neil Gaiman and I’d throw in an additional vote for his books too.

Also def the Chaos Walking trilogy by Patrick Ness. It’s going to be a movie soon too!
posted by like_neon at 2:29 AM on June 8, 2018

One that is hard to get into initially but is worth it is CS Lewis' "Out of the Silent Planet". It is the first of a trilogy, but honestly stands well alone and I don't like the other two. But, anyway, keep reading to where the spaceship lands. I like how Lewis has three different but "equal" sets of "animal" people, which, it was written in 1938 so I'm sure there have been many smarter discussions of it with regards to "race". It does really talk a bit about capitalism and colonizers and imperialism in it's own way.
posted by jillithd at 7:29 AM on June 8, 2018 [1 favorite]

Refugee by Alan Gratz is a fabulous and very timely book. It's been on and off the NY Times bestseller list all year. The author has a bunch of other WWII books, mainly for younger readers. He tours a lot of middle schools, and is an amazing and funny guy (he also happens to play D&D with me, so if your son gets into his books, I could tell all kinds of secret stories!). Seriously, though, Refugee made me cuss and cry and yelp with surprise.
posted by rikschell at 3:47 PM on June 8, 2018

Twelve is when I read The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. I’m not sure whether it ticks any of your boxes - it’s somehow not dystopian even though the Earth gets destroyed around page twenty - but I loved how Adams could turn a phrase.

Seconding Susan Cooper - I loved that series. My username comes from those books!
posted by eirias at 2:18 PM on June 30, 2018