I was thinking of Sweet Valley, too, but really also Nancy Drew and Hardy Boys (any vintage), Christopher Pike's thrillers, and so on. Like, Encyclopedia Brown (which is aimed toward boys!) was the last time kids sounded like kids to me in books until Lloyd Alexander and Duane's wizard books showed me that sometimes they sound like adults. My library didn't have much Diana Wynne Jones.
Hmm, sometimes. A lot of what Reason reads "for girls" has very limited emotional reasoning--I don't follow her reading closely at this point, but sometimes I flip through something before we return it. In this age range Ursula Vernon's Danny Dragonbreath books are appealing without being gendered specifically, though for boys it's reassuring that Danny is a boy (it's an ensemble thing). We've given a lot of kids vol. 1 as a birthday gift.
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Date: 2019-09-15 01:18 am (UTC)I was thinking of Sweet Valley, too, but really also Nancy Drew and Hardy Boys (any vintage), Christopher Pike's thrillers, and so on. Like, Encyclopedia Brown (which is aimed toward boys!) was the last time kids sounded like kids to me in books until Lloyd Alexander and Duane's wizard books showed me that sometimes they sound like adults. My library didn't have much Diana Wynne Jones.
Hmm, sometimes. A lot of what Reason reads "for girls" has very limited emotional reasoning--I don't follow her reading closely at this point, but sometimes I flip through something before we return it. In this age range Ursula Vernon's Danny Dragonbreath books are appealing without being gendered specifically, though for boys it's reassuring that Danny is a boy (it's an ensemble thing). We've given a lot of kids vol. 1 as a birthday gift.