cahn | Things that I have read due to having kids

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Things that I have read due to having kids

So, A. likes for me to read things that he reads, and E. doesn't like me to read things that she reads, but this year she has had this school challenge to read books in a bunch of different categories (this is genius by her teacher, because it's definitely gotten her to read books she wouldn't have read otherwise), and so I've had to read some books to see whether they were books she would enjoy reading. :) (And sometimes I got her books that were books I thought I might like to read :) )

And a question for the DW hive mind! One of E's categories she needs to read a book for is "political thriller," and it is stumping us because most political thrillers are, well, for grownups. I am not too worried about strict categories -- her teacher is flexible, anything that could even very slightly be described as such would probably work. The catch is that it has to be middle-school/at-most-YA, otherwise it will be too much for E. (Which rules out a lot of political SF, which otherwise I could use to fulfill the category. Hm... maybe Foundation would be at her level, although I worry it might be too dry for her. I am absolutely happy to count Foundation as "political thriller" for this purpose :P )

-Diary of a Wimpy Kid (Kinney) - I've now read a bunch of these; they're a series but don't really need to be read in order (though there's some continuity; e.g. you'd have to read The Long Haul to figure out how they got a pig as a pet). A. absolutely loves these. I have mixed feelings about them. I can see why he loves them and they're certainly awfully addictive -- even as an adult in my 40's I got sucked into them just about as hard as A. did. They have a sense of humor that is funny both to kids and adults, and the drawings are hilarious. On the other hand, Greg (the narrator) is also just kind of mean and not very nice, and is often just awful to the people he calls his friends. And then again, his meanness isn't at all condoned by the narrative, and he usually gets some sort of comeuppance for it at the end. A. and I have had some talks about when Greg does things that aren't very nice, and A. doesn't seem like any of the meanness is rubbing off on him, so I guess it's okay? Anyway, my favorite is The Long Haul, because there aren't any shenanigans with him being mean to his "friends," and the Terrible No-Good Vacation is one that any parent can empathize with :P and also the subplot with the pig I actually quite liked :PP

-Wayside School Gets a Little Stranger (Sachar) - My beloved third-grade teacher introduced us to Sideways Stories from Wayside School, which I adored, but I didn't know there were sequels until E. came along, and then apparently I didn't read them (E. did) until A. came along and wanted me to read it. These books are hilarious and very, very weird. Props to Sachar for really tapping into the third-grade geek mindset here -- they honestly do read as rather alien to my adult brain, and yet I remember the book making total sense to my third-grade self.

-The Outsiders (Hinton) - I'd never read this before, despite seeing it at the library countless times and knowing it was Great Lit :) This was for the category of "under-18" (one of the stupidest categories in my opinion) because apparently Hinton wrote it before she was 18, and it was the only book I could find that I didn't oppose her reading (well, I suppose there's Diary of Anne Frank, but she would have bounced right off of that one). Buuuuut I guess I'm glad for that stupid category, because this book is really good, there's a reason I'd heard of it so many times :P Of course there's no lack of grimdark YA today, but I can see how this was groundbreaking as the first, and it talks about class in a way that I think is still quite relevant today, and it's deftly written, it's written by someone who knew what they were doing, and it's really surprising that it was written by someone that young. E. liked it as well.

-They Called Us Enemy (Takei) - DNF, but not because it wasn't excellent -- what I read of it was excellent and I highly recommend it. What with... 2021... and everything... I couldn't take reading about the Japanese-American internment camps and anti-Asian sentiment. It was just too much. E. read it and liked it. (I forget whether she counted it as one of the history categories or the Asian-American category.)

-I'd Tell You I'd Love You, But Then I'd Have to Kill You (Carter) - Best title ever! This one's been on my radar for a long time, since Sarah Rees Brennan mentioned it off-handedly on her blog many years ago. Spy boarding school, what's not to love! This was for the "thriller" category. I think I would have liked this a lot had I read it as a middle schooler, but as an adult I ended up skimming about half of it. Partially it's that I'm just too old for it now; partially it's that the spy girl ends up lying and lying to the love interest character, and I don't like that as a plot device. (I'm glad to report though that it's not sanctioned by the narrative.)

The Family Romanov: Murder, Rebellion, and the Fall of Imperial Russia (Fleming) - I knew basically nothing about the Romanovs or about the Russian Revolution before reading this book, which manages to make one both sympathetic towards the Tsar and his family, and also massively facepalming at them. (One of the quotes on amazon characterizes them as "doomed and clueless," which... yeah.) And the book brings in a lot of sources (quotes from primary, when possible) about what it was like for the peasants and workers at this time, which I really appreciated and which provides a lot of good context for what was going on. And the middle-to-high-school reading level really worked for me as a primer for stuff I didn't know anything about to start with. I really liked this, and will progress on to Massie once I've finished his other books (I'm reading Peter the Great right now) :D E. was frustrated by it and did not get very far; it is clearly a little beyond her reading level.

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Does it have to be modern politics? There's a lot of kid-appropriate books that involve thrills and politics, but they're historical.

I'm gonna say no, it doesn't have to be modern politics! Her teacher is extremely flexible, and my thinking is that if you're going to make middle schoolers read a "political thriller," you're going to just have to take what you can get :P What did you have in mind?

Westmark by Lloyd Alexander. The sequels are even more so, but they're pretty intense, especially The Kestrel. You can read Westmark by itself though.

Frances Hendry's historicals about political machinations and fighting in ancient Britain and medieval Scotland.

Rosemary Sutcliff has a couple kid-appropriate books though the writing style is still difficult/sophisticated.

Ooh, excellent, thank you! I have... never even heard of Frances Hendry and that sounds right up my alley, actually :P

I actually gave E one of Sutcliffe's Arthurian books for the "legend" category, but I hadn't thought of her other ones!

Sideways Stories from Wayside School, which I adored, but I didn't know there were sequels until E. came along, and then apparently I didn't read them (E. did) until A. came along and wanted me to read it.

There's a brand new sequel, too (Wayside School Under a Cloud of Doom) -- about which I learned via Yuletide, of all things. I didn't like that one as much as the others, which I read in middle school and then read again when my kids were in the target age demographic. But I dunno if it's because it's a less fun book, or if I'm just more distant from its ethos now that even my children have outgrown elementary school... But I love the original stories!

I think I vaguely recall Ally Carter having a political thriller series as well? (I haven't read any of her books, but a friend's kid was really into the spy ones and also read the other ones, IIRC.)

Hmm, I think I must be thinking of this one, but the blurb doesn't make it sound all that political...

I do suspect Foundation would be too dry for someone E's age -- at least, I found it very boring when I tried to read it around the same time I read and loved LotR, and then it took me until late high school to pick it up again. And that was with me already loving Asimov's other stuff.

Would Hunger Games be too much? I feel like, if the teacher is flexible, an argument could be made for it being a political thriller, at least later on in the trilogy...

Edited 2022-01-15 08:26 (UTC)

Ahahaha, I will have to find that one too! Huh, All Fall Down does sounds political enough for my purposes! And oh, yeah, Hunger Games! She's just old enough to read those now, I think. Wow, I can't believe I now have a child old enough to read Hunger Games :P

Wow, I can't believe I now have a child old enough to read Hunger Games :P

It's a weird feeling, isn't it?

I think my kids read it around this age and didn't seem to find it too intense/scary. I was reading it along with them, so I didn't have that "old enough to read X" moment over those books, but I did have it over Ender's Game, which they read around the same time. (I didn't read Ender until high school myself, because I'd never come across it before stumbling on it in my high school library, but I knew people who'd read it much younger and seemed fine, so encouraged them to read it before watching the movie.)

Yeah, E. doesn't find books intense or scary, and not really movies either (though she's never watched or read a true horror book) -- she seems to have a pretty good sense of what's real and what's made up. I read Ender's Game the summer after seventh grade and it was one of those really intense experiences for me -- it's one of the books that I've actually told E not to read until at least that time, because I'm worried about her reading it too early (she read Narnia and Harry Potter too early, with the consequence that she didn't like them as much as I think she would have if she'd gotten to them later).

My immediate thought for political thriller is either Lloyd Alexander's Westmark or Diana Wynne Jones' Drowned Ammet, though those are both secondary-world if that is a consideration.

Ooh, those both sound excellent, and I think E is at the point where she might actually be able to read and like them. At this point I think both her teacher and I would be totally fine with secondary-world :)

Hmmm, if you don't mind your daughter getting heartbroken by the ending, how about George Orwell's Animal Farm? Which is also useful to her since it's one literary classic she then has read. And it's definitely intended as political. (Is it ever.) Also, it's short, and even without knowing the analogy a contemporary reader of Orwell's would immediately make (i.e. the Russian Revolution), Orwell was aiming for more than that, and many of the general points still stand.

Animal Farm! RIGHT! This is about the age I remember it started showing up on all my reading lists when I was a kid, too. And E. is a big fan of short, heh.

I haven't read any of these, but it looks from a Google search like YA political thrillers are basically a new category that didn't really exist for our generation at all.

http://stackedbooks.org/political-thrillers-for-teens-a-booklist/

Goodreads also suggests that the second Hunger Games book might sort of count?

Ooooh that link is edifying and makes me realize that Cory Doctorow's "Little Brother" and its sequels may be in this category.

Cory Doctorow! What an excellent idea, E should read him in any case -- I think she still has the SF category open as well (I've been feeding her SF, but it's all gone to other categories.)

WHAT. Yeah, I had no idea, everything I was thinking of was like Tom Clancy and stuff. Really useful and interesting, thank you!

Gordon Korman wrote the first Bruno and Boots (Macdonald Hall) book when he was 12 in case you want a more comedic book for "written by someone under 18"!

I think Jean Merrill's "The Pushcart War" is kind of a political thriller.

Ohhhh really? I loved the Bruno and Boots books! Excellent, I will keep Bruno and Boots in my back pocket in case she has to do this list again! (Not beyond the realm of probability.)

Oh man, I also loved The Pushcart War, I should read that again myself.

Robert Cormier, I Am the Cheese, might count. Or here's a more contemporary list, as Cormier's book is over 40 years old now.

Aaand someone else found the same list already. Sorry!

Oh gosh, I was SO confused by I Am the Cheese when I read it as a child! (I finally reread it as an adult and figured out most of what was going on, lol.) And thank you for the list -- repetition is always good for my disorganized self! -- I had no idea YA political thriller is now a thing!

That's a really good idea for getting kids to read more broadly, something Cub struggles with. He loves reading, but he's a lot like me: he would happily read the same books over and over and over again, and trying to persuade him out of this is hard. I often have to go straight-up bribery: first I'll read you a chapter of [book you're not interested in yet] and then I'll read you a chapter of [current favourite].

Yes, I'm really happy with this! The idea works well especially for someone like E, who has a natural self-competitive streak This Large, and within hours of receiving the list was plotting out her course of action and how she would distribute books that would fit more than one category, and who every month carefully tracks how many categories she's read and whether it tracks with how many she has to read for the year.

She never rereads books (unless she's forgotten everything about the book), but she also reads a very narrow range of books -- it's all animal-centric fantasy if she can get away with it. The summer before we got this reading category thing, it was, I think, all Redwall and Warrior Cats books.

For political thriller : James Patterson's "Maximum Ride" might count? It's got sf/f elements and dystopia elements (basically it's wingfic) but it's ya by someone who writes that genre and it mostly fits? I have not read but it's been pretty popular for awhile.

Maybe also Alex Rider but I see you have that covered elsewhere.

I wonder if you could get away with "The Princess Diaries".

Maybe the Young Prince Black Panther novels? He's a prince, everything he does is political, even if that's not really the main genre.

And there's been a spate of great books for younger readers that directly address Black Lives Matter activism lately. IDK if that counts as a political thriller but it should. "A Good Kind Of Trouble" is the first one I would rec leaning younger because them main character doesn't have any loved one violently murdered; The Hate U Give is the rec if you are ok with that. The March graphic novels by John Lewis are also really good and full of thrilling, tense political stuff, if she liked the Takei. So is "Boxers" and "Saints".

If you want something a hell of a lot lighter, sillier, and aimed younger (which let's be real is probably closer in spirit to the adult genre) "the capitol mysteries" by Rob Roy is about the kids of someone high up in the DC establishment solving political mysteries.

(Searching the tagmash on LT is getting me a lot of classic YA dystopias and fantasy, Cory Doctorow as mentioned above, and also 'Leia, princess of Alderaan' by Claudia Gray. So I think you've got a lot of scope .)

Edited 2022-01-15 16:18 (UTC)

Oooooh these all sound excellent, especially the Black Lives Matter books, which yeah I'm willing to count as a political thriller :) (Her teacher is very flexible and I think realizes I am gonna pick books that will at least somewhat correspond to the category, lol.)

Robert Louis Stevenson's "Kidnapped" is arguably a political thriller (laying out the basics of conflict and governance in Highland and Lowland Scotland after Culloden) and it's certainly YA.

I second Westmark, for whoever said that.

Oh huuuuuuh this makes me realize I never read Kidnapped, and only a kid-"adapted" version of Treasure Island! I should maybe rectify that :P

And I am very pleased by the Westmark suggestion! :D

Seconding rushthatspeaks' suggestions (Westmark and Drowned Ammet). I liked Princess Bride as a youngish adult despite its love story and not because of it, and I agree with melannen that it might qualify as well. If secondary-world settings are okay, the second Kyoshi tie-in book (F. C. Yee) would count, but not the first one, as adventure-thriller hybrids go.

I asked Reason (then had to try defining "political thriller," as "sort of like a mystery novel but with more government, less murder, more betrayal") and got the suggestion of Stuart Gibbs' Spy School series, which Reason has not read, "but a lot of people really like them."

And FWIW I've read Ally Carter's first Gallagher Girls book, and it does not qualify, IMO--not sure about the Embassy Row ones.

I have not heard of the Spy School series! That sounds very promising.

Yeah, now that I've read the first Gallagher Girls book, I agree it shouldn't qualify -- though I looked up synopses and it looks like some of the later ones might. But I'm letting E count it for the "thriller" category, which is stretching things but not unduly so (whereas I think it would be stretching things a little too much to call it "political thriller") :) I don't know anything about the Embassy Row books -- had not heard of them before this morning! :)

Agreed re: Gallagher and general thriller.

oh--Code Name Verity, perhaps.

For what it's worth, when I need new books for D (which is all the time), I have two go-to lists:

* https://www.amightygirl.com/books

* the old NC Battle of the Books lists. (Did you ever do Battle of the Books? I loved it.) These days the lists are much shorter than when we were in middle school, but they still include plenty of excellent books from diverse genres. I don't think they're actually all organized in one place; I just end up searching for them by year.

Thank you! No, I never did Battle of the Books -- I'm pretty sure we've talked about it, but I never even knew about it when we were growing up. Huh, how do you find anything searching by year?

I just mean use search terms like, "nc battle of the books list 2019". Without the year, I tend to only get the most recent list.

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Things that I have read due to having kids

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