children’s book recs?
Nov. 12th, 2020 05:27 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dragonlady7guess they're YA!, i have a whole list of stuff farmkid is too young for yet that will be perfect, but i figured i'd solicit input
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My older sister just sent out the annual “So, my children need Christmas presents” email, which I’m not wording well– it’s always a very flustered “ah crap you want me to tell you what they want and I need to come up with something” because she lives several hundred miles away and we don’t see one another very often and that was steadily improving as they got older and now it’s been eight months and probably we can’t cross state lines anytime soon 😭 but anyway.
She mentioned that the middle one, a boy of … 11? I think he just turned 11… is hard to shop for. He likes playing sports, mostly, and doesn’t like fashion or toys.
But he loves books. And she said she’d love more books for him. Currently, he loves Eragon and Harry Potter, and is making an attempt at the Lord of the Rings. (When Farmsister was his age, I read her the scary parts of the Two Towers, out loud, in a tent, by flashlight, and it was the most fun summer we ever had together, so. Yeah, I was 16; while all you were out partying, I studied the blade hobbits.) So I’ve got a few books in mind I might send for him, but I’d love some more recommendations.
And the other boy, he’s not that into fiction, and he’s just about to turn 13 and loves The Way Things Work type of books– but he’s learning French, and I was wondering if anyone had any recs for easy-to-read books in French that aren’t little kid books, you know? That one’s more of a long shot. (An easy-to-read book in French about how something works, even better, but like, how do you even look for that?)
(He, by the way, is flourishing in this pandemic– remote learning is perfect for him because he doesn’t get sucked into being a cut-up or acting out for attention, he doesn’t have to roll out of bed until 8:45 am, he gets to be by himself most of the time but his family is around so he’s not unattended [he’d frequently had to be a latchkey kid before and he hated that], he really can devote himself to learning what he’s interested in, and he’s just doing really well, which is fantastic, as most of the other kids I know are Not Doing So Great. He’s been studying French for a while but never cared until now; now he thinks it’s cool. Who knows! He’s on his own knowledge journey.)
The little girl is getting a doll and needs doll clothes so I’m super set on that, I just have to get off my ass and actually sew some things. And Farmkid probably will like doll clothes too so I’m just gonna roll with that.
The books of Jonathan Stroud
Date: 2020-11-12 04:03 pm (UTC)The Bartimaeus Sequence has been a favorite for my kids (girls and a boy) from around that age but the Lockwood & Co sequence is also good.
Unfortunately, I can’t help with any books in French.
books
Date: 2020-11-12 04:04 pm (UTC)For the fantasy reader, Fire Bringer by David Clement-Davies (high fantasy with a deer as the protagonist); Watership Down by Richard Adams; any collection of Jack London stories (but should include The Call of the Wild).
no subject
Date: 2020-11-12 04:54 pm (UTC)Nine-Pound Hammer series
Monster Blood Tattoo series
Sal and Gabi Break the Universe
Ash Mistray series
Mirror of Fire and Dreaming series
Gregor the Overlander
Mars Evacuees
One of those is bound to be a hit.
no subject
Date: 2020-11-12 05:28 pm (UTC)I also want to put in a plug for Rosemary Sutcliff's YA historical novels, especially The Eagle of the Ninth and The Silver Branch. They are set in ancient Britain and have protagonists of fierce integrity (in contrast to Harry Potter, who lied so much—understandably, as an abused child, but still...).
Sutcliff was disabled, herself, and her characters sometimes have disabilities to cope with, but the disability is not usually the point of the story, but rather a factor of varying importance in whatever adventure story she's telling.
Be warned that someone tried to base a Channing Tatum movie on The Eagle of the Ninth. I have not watched it, in significant part because just the casting of the two main characters makes me nuts. (No. No. And again, Noooooo.)
The Eagle of the Ninth and The Silver Branch are two thirds of a very loose trilogy. Each book stands alone, but, if read in order, there is a nice bonus realization/recognition. The third book in the trilogy, The Lantern Bearers, is also very good, but largely rather grim, though with a cautiously positive ending.
Among Sutcliff's other books, I particularly liked The Mark of the Horse Lord, which is also grim, especially in the ending, but in a thoroughly triumphant way. The protagonist of that one doesn't start out with as much integrity as usual for Sutcliff's main characters, but he grows into it.
The only book that is springing to mind as a non-fiction possibility, for the older nephew, is a mostly-photos book about fluid dynamics turbulence, which I bought, years ago, because the photos were just so cool. My copy is in a box, somewhere, but I think it might have been An Album of Fluid Motion, by Milton Van Dyke. Unfortunately, that book seems to be out of print, and the used copies on the market start at $60+ (for a fairly slender book) and climb steeply in price. I mention it on the slim chance that you might run into a more reasonably priced copy.
My own taste in non-fiction runs more to John McPhee and Michael Pollan than how-things-work books. See what you think of McPhee's The Founding Fish, or Pollan's The Botany of Desire? These aren't YA books, so it might be a bit soon to give them to your older nephew, particularly as the latter has a major section on marijuana.
Very cool that distance learning suits him so well, and that his curiosity has awakened and is being fed! Me, I was a rather incurious kid—I only started feeling much curiousity in my 20s, from what I can recall.
This wouldn't be useful for gift-giving, but has your older nephew seen The Story of Stuff? It's a 20-minute-or-so documentary about how things go from raw materials to products to waste, with an ecological focus.
Here's the plain English version: https://youtu.be/6_UZjcy3x-s
There IS a version of this with French subtitles, in three parts: https://youtu.be/rdunyX3jymk and https://youtu.be/1D9J8jiBeqw and https://youtu.be/DnYUT9TkNOU
I hope something there helps!
no subject
Date: 2020-11-12 07:47 pm (UTC)https://www.requiemart.com/ has a bunch of different sizes for reasonable prices and their patterns are easy to follow.