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bestill
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| Posted: May 13 2008 at 3:35pm | IP Logged
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Hello,
I have a 12 year old girl who is an avid reader. We are running into the problem that she has read so many books that now when we go to the library I am hesitant at some of the titles she looks at. I always skim the summary and try to get a feel of it's topic but sometimes it is just not clear. So many of the books she has picked up are new agey or teen modern secular yuck!
I know there are so many Christian sites that rate and review movies, is there one for books?
Thanks so much
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teachingmyown
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| Posted: May 13 2008 at 7:01pm | IP Logged
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My dd 12 has been reading Jane Austen, Dickens and Shelock Holmes. Other recent hits were the Boston Jane books, Girl of the Limberlost (I loved this!), George MacDonald books and Louisa May Alcott, again.
I have the same trouble keeping her stocked with good books.
I try to look to other Catholics, or non-Catholic Christians I trust, for book lists such as Elizabeth Foss, Sally Clarkson, and Sonlight. I also like the book Honey for a Teen's Heart.
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In Christ,
Molly
wife to Court & mom to ds '91, dd '96, ds '97, dds '99, '01, '03, '06, and dss '07 and 01/20/11
Remembering Today
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hopalenik
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| Posted: May 13 2008 at 10:20pm | IP Logged
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Hi,
When I was a teen there was a group of girl historical fiction novels that were fabulous. Maybe you could dig some of them up at the library...they were very light romances but only a kiss and engagement at the end. The historical fiction part was incredible very livable, they were written from a secular point of view and I don't remember any moral issues at all about them.
http://www.amazon.com/Susannah-Sunfire-No-Candice-Ransom/dp/ 0590330640/ref=pd_sim_b_img_4
That is the best one but there were about 32 of them or so. They were called Sunfire books. I learned alot about history from them. I only read the first 20, so i can't comment on the later ones but these would be a good pick for something fun to read. I have another devout Catholic friend who said the same thing.
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Holly
Mom to dd 10, twins dd and ds (transplant as baby that failed 05/09, permanent dialysis patient) 8 , dd 5 and dd 3 1/2 and dd in Feb 2009. 2 I hope to meet in heaven.
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SallyT
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| Posted: May 13 2008 at 11:51pm | IP Logged
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We quit going to the library for a time (I know, shock city) for that very reason. Instead, I took my daughter to the used bookstore and said, "Let me show you something," and I steered her to the "Literature" shelf and helped her pick out some books to buy: Great Expectations, I think, and a stack of others. Jane Eyre for sure. Whatever she hadn't already read. Once she had read real books, she began to lose her taste -- never that strong -- for the teeny trash. Now we can go to the library again, and she has a level of discernment she didn't have before.
BTW, I realize I could have taken her to the "literature" in the library and accomplished all this for free. Somehow making a shopping trip of it, rather than trying to steer her away from the familiar section in the library, made it easier to persuade her to try new books. Now she loves Jane Austen, Dickens, all the greats.
Sally
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CrunchyMom
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| Posted: May 14 2008 at 6:43am | IP Logged
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Sally, what a wonderful idea. I so wish I'd had a teacher or SOMEONE who would have steered me away from the garbage and toward the good books early on. I read incessantly. I "self" censored some of the bad a good bit--I wouldn't read Sweet Valley High, but I devoured "The Babysitters Club" I read all the old Nancy Drew books but only a few of the newer ones because they got pretty racy!
I read a zillion Grace Livingston Hill books, however, I could have had so much good literature cluttering my mind instead of just twaddle! 
Good Luck! Your teenagers are so blessed to have you guiding them and you are blessed to have the wealth of knowledge in helping you guide them!
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Lindsay
Five Boys(6/04) (6/06) (9/08)(3/11),(7/13), and 1 girl (5/16)
My Symphony
[URL=http://mysymphonygarden.blogspot.com/]Lost in the Cosmos[/UR
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SallyT
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| Posted: May 14 2008 at 2:06pm | IP Logged
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Well, I was totally uncensored and did NOT self-censor very well -- I read all kinds of things I would not let my own kids read. Maya Angelou's I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings comes to mind as a book which I found deeply disturbing, even though I didn't really, fully get the most disturbing stuff, when I read it at age 12. I read whatever books were lying around in the homes of people I babysat for; I read every cruddy late-60s/early-70s teenage book -- My Darling, My Hamburger, Go Ask Alice, you name it. I was very secondhand-streetwise by the time I was in 8th grade, and I had some fairly warped ideas about, for example, relations between men and women which persisted into adulthood and presented difficulties in my own marriage which I, and I'm sure my husband, too, would rather I'd just not brought with me.
I'm older and hopefully at least a little wiser now, and the experience was useful in that it makes me want to offer a moral dimension to reading which was lacking in my own childhood -- a book was a book, and books were good, and that was that. (and weirdly enough, Go Ask Alice was an ASSIGNMENT in SCHOOL, at my conservative little all-girls preppy school. Here, young ladies, you can learn how to be a promiscuous drug-using teenage runaway . . . )
Anyway, I don't like total uncensoring, but I cannot make myself make ALL the decisions about what my kids read. Discernment is part of growing up, and I just try to offer the kind of guidance I think I might have appreciated -- or not, because I was a fairly, um, determined child. Anyway, sharing books I love and know to be good is one of the joys of having older children. So is talking about the books they read. That's an habitual occupation in our house anyway, and it gives us opportunities to both assert what we think makes a book good or not-good, and to discuss elements of things the kids have run across.
So we don't buy everything on that lit shelf, but going to the used bookstore is a great treat for that particular child, and discovering life beyond the children's/young-adult-fiction shelf was like a great door opening for her.
Sally
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4Real Forums : Mothering and Family Life
Topic: Appropriate preteen teen books
