Mumsnet Talk

Have just spent invested in a lot of bookpeople/redhouse/banana orders.
What should I put to one side?
DD is 6, Year 2, reads like a demon but at the end of the day she's only six. She like's humour and adventure stories. She read the first Harry Potter but stopped half way through the second finding it 'scary' but she liked quite a few of Micheal Morpugos eg Kasper, Tips, etc.

They're all a bit random, sale bargains, RedHouse was particularly good and Amazon are providing cheap, dented stock Christmas returns.

Alienography
Ottoline & yellow cat
Pickle King
Cardturner
Moomin land winter
Micheal Rosens sad book
Horrible Histories box set
Horrible science set
Carpet people
Inkdeath
Buster Bayliss
Ogre of Oglefort - Eva Ibbotson
Spiderwick - I've already noted the use of the word 'crappier' in the first few pages, does it get worse?
Adventures of the Little Wooden Horse
Marcia Williams comic strip classics
Tales of terror from the black ship
Horowitz Humour Collection - ten books £10 on banana books

Sadly our local library is very limited and the school keep all the best books in the cupboard! Hence my credit card is being battered.

What do you think, what should I hid for later?

Tales of Terror from the Black Ship is bloody terrifying. If she couldn't cope with HP I would save that one for later (is v good though).

Similarly Michael Rosen's sad book is a real blub fest - basically a picture book about how he felt after his son died of meningitis. Useful for talking about grieving and beautifully written, but not really a rollicking good read.

The Little Wooden Horse sounds a good bet.

Inkdeath is a bit involved and she should really read InkHeart first.

Horrible Histories are always fun to have, and if she reads and likes Ottoline then there are other books in the series she can plough through.

Moominland is an old fashioned classic. I would keep that one and see how she goes.

Don't know much about the others, sorry!

Thanks MerryLegs,

I flicked through Rosen's Sad Book years ago in a book shop and started blubbing. I thought it might be useful if the dog or one of the grandparents pop their clogs.

So hard to tell from the covers whether the book will be 'Lemony Snicket light' or actually really hard core tales of terror.

Alienography - anything by Chris Riddell is brilliant
Ottoline & yellow cat - dd loved in y2
Pickle King - dunno
Cardturner - ditto
Moomin land winter - quite dense and would help to have read first in series - would keep for later
Micheal Rosens sad book - wot Merrylegs said
Horrible Histories box set - good fun but v repetitive, ds loved in y3
Horrible science set - ditto
Carpet people - dunno
Inkdeath - def not for y2 plus is third book in trilogy
Buster Bayliss - dd loved at 6
Ogre of Oglefort - Eva Ibbotson - ditto
Spiderwick - I've already noted the use of the word 'crappier' in the first few pages, does it get worse? would keep for older
Adventures of the Little Wooden Horse - perfect for y2
Marcia Williams comic strip classics - don't know them
Tales of terror from the black ship - no way - terrifying
Horowitz Humour Collection - ten books £10 on banana books - Horowitz v funny but generally quite boyish - ds loved at 7 or 8, dd not so much

Marcia Williams tends to include some of the more adult themes -- e.g. her King Arthur goes into Lancelot and Guinevere -- so you'll have to make a call on whether you want to field those.

Inkdeath is the third in a trilogy (other two are Inkheart and Inkspell) and won't make much sense on its own -- also aimed at a few years older anyway.

Adventures of the Little Wooden Horse is a lovely book,classic.

The Adventures of the Little Wooden Horse, although it has a happy ending, is absolutely heartbreaking at some points! I loved it and used to blub over it happily as a kid.

Brilliant, I tend to have a book splurge several times once a year but the cheap Bookpeople deals change so I try to spot the future favourites to hide.

The odd random ones are all hard backs, £1 each, what a lucky girl.

I don't like the age banding thing for books but it does make life hard, thankyou Mumsnet folk.

Card Turner is a teen book. Definitely not for a 6 year old.

Ink Death - third in trilogy. Probably would need to read first 2 - they're a big old read though.

Tales of Terror - teen horror. No.

Pickle King - body parts. Would probably leave it until she's a couple of years older.

Sad Book - good book but wouldn't class it as a 'gripping' read.

Moominland Winter - dependent on reading ability and whether she can cope with all the descriptive writing.

Ottoline, Buster Bayliss, Ogre of Oglefort, Wooden Horse, Horowitz Humour and Spiderwick all fine (Spiderwick are American which would explain 'crappier' but doesn't get worse than this and is very popular but she may find some of it a bit dark.

Wouldn't have said this was a particularly good selection IMHO. It may have been worth spending the money on fewer books which would appeal to her now.
Any chance you can return any of them?

Thanks Madame Hooch, I'll stash away the unsuitable ones, most of them are hardbacks and only a £1 each so not worth the postage to return.

She reads fast with good comprehension (from what I can tell). She sat down after school yesterday and polished off the first Spiderwick book before bedtime. I'd read that one so we chatted about it and I can't fault her. We try to balance it but she'd rather read then play with toys.

So a small, muddled local library along with an infants school with extremely limited choice means she ends up reading stuff thats far from ideal. I like to hide away the older stuff though

For this stage she's worked her way through DH & I's childhood library, - Blyton, Pepperpot, Wombles, fairy stories. The Borrowers & Pratchett's Truckers were abandoned for now

New stuff she's enjoyed like the Tollins, How to train a dragon, Rainbow Faries, Astrosaurs non-fiction like Sandi Toksvigs Girls are Best, various Usborne & DK books.

When we travel to the big city we max out our library cards . Hopefully the move to Junior school in September will buy us some breathing space.

All further suggestions very welcome, please

Blackbob - I do sympathise. I'm lucky to live somewhere with a good library and good bookshops.

As someone who can speak from personal experience, I would advocate against buying too many books to stash away for when she's older. I used to do this for DD, now 12, without taking into account the fact that she would reach an age when she had very specific ideas about what she wanted to read and, consequently, didn't want to read the books I'd bought for her some years ago, hoping she'd 'grow' into them! It's like buying clothes for them now to fit for when they're older. Their personal taste and current trend will take over and you will, like me, in all probability end up living in a house of 'just in case books!'

Do you live anywhere near a book shop? Often all the really good, new stuff is in the shops rather than the libraries. Even Redhouse/Book People only have a certain selection but a good bookshop with knowledgeable children's booksellers should have stacks of ideas. Some of them may even have children's reading groups that your DD could join.

Given what you have said she likes to read, I would try the following:-

Judy Blume - Superfudge series

Beverley Cleary - Beezus and Ramona series (DD loved these with a passion)

Georgia Byng - Molly Moon

Alan McDonald - Troll Trouble

Louis Sachar - Marvin Redpost

Dick King-Smith - Sophie

Andrew Cope - Spy Dog

Katie Davies - The Great Hamster Massacre

All of the above are either in 5-8 fiction (content wise) or on the cusp of 9-12. I've read them all and they're all really good and very popular with her age group and slightly older. They are also all series books. If you go on to a brilliant website called Fantastic Fiction and type in the author's names, you will get the series in order. Check with your library to see whether they can order them in for you - I know our library has books which circulate round local libraries which can be ordered in at no cost on a child's ticket.

Blackbob. I am a children's bookseller with the the well known chain who has killed off their apostrophe. I also run reading groups in schools. If you PM me and give me your address, I will send your DD some new books for her to read. She can write me book reviews if she likes and send them to me.

I'll have a look through dd's extensive collection which needs a radical sort out as she has grown out of lots of it. I know she has sets of Dick King Smith/Worst Witch type books.

What books would people recceomend for a 10 year old girl in Year 5. She is a very strong reader.

I have a similar problem. DD is 7 with a reading age of 11. She is a voracious reader and I have trouble finding books that aren't too scary but that she'll find interesting. She doesn't like anything scary unlike my younger son! She hasn't actually read any of those on your list! When she was 6 in year 2 she loved Roald Dahl (except The Witches), she read a lot of pony books, Enid Blyton and Dick King Smith.

Horrible Histories too grim for my kids until older, at least age 8, I think.
I don't know the rest of the titles, but they sound quite macabre, to be honest.
DD is 10 & gets rave reviews for her literacy skills, but still pretty happy to keep nose buried in Tilly's Pony Tales type books (sweet & innocent).

Y2 DD spent 3 months reading nothing but Calvin & Hobbes.

We 'lost' DD one afternoon during the holidays, she'd hidden herself behind the sofa with a duvet and a stack of our old Calvin & Hobbes books

I think the Horrible Histories tv series has de-sensitised DD but I might hold them back. I think with fiction you are manipulated to care more IYSWIM.

I'm pretty relaxed about content of books, I read voraciously as a child and I really don't think the occasional whiff of unsuitable material damaged me.

If in doubt though I'd stick to the classics, the old children's classics are challenging even for the best readers, in terms of vocabularly and complexity, but there's very little "teen" content in them.

So I'd start with the Milly-Molly-Mandy, Paddington etc type and move on through Alice in Wonderland, Wind in Willows, Just William etc, up through things like Anne of Green gables, what Katy did/Little women or perhaps Biggles/Jennings etc depending on the dc's tastes.

My dc read lots of more recent lit as well, some of it already in this thread, but in terms of looking for new ideas for good readers, the classics give you a limitless supply. Also, my latest excitement, loads of them are totally free on the kindle.

DD is 6 too and her current favourites are

Clover Twigg books
The farthest away mountain by Lynne Reid Banks
Princess Polly to the Rescue by Mary Lister
The City of Ember
Rapunzel's Revenge (graphic novel)
Zita the Spacegirl (graphic novel)
The Extra-Ordinary Princess by Ebbit
Ronia, the Robber's daughter by Lindgren
The Squire series by Tamora Pierce (I have the Lioness series put by for when she is a little older)
The Ordinary Princess by Kaye
Igraine the Brave by Cornelia Funke
The Lily Quench series by Prior
The Wrestling Princess and other stories
Clever Gretchen and other forgotten fairytales by Lurie
The practical princess and other liberating fairytales by jay williams
Horrible Histories and Science
Secret of Platform 13 by Ibbotson (although she weeps as the little boy gets separated from his parents for years)
Worst Witch by Ibbotson

She loves adventure stories, especially if there is a strong female character. Two of those were my favourites as a child - Farthest Away Mountain and Princess Polly and I got copies second hand from Amazon for her.

She has the Inkspell series but they are very thick books and slightly off-putting I think. One she liked that I was surprised about was The Princess and the Goblin (Macdonald), despite the fact that I found it incomprehensible. She loved the language and I ended up buying her a dictionary so we could discuss the words.

One other thought - we have a very, very tiny library, and dd has long since read all of their stock that appeals to her, but we can order children's books from anywhere in the county online for free. It might be worth checking if the same is true at your library.

My other good source of cheap 2nd hand copies of children's classics is Abebooks, generally if you are a bit picky about which shops and go for those that offer cheaper postage for multiple buys you can get 5 books for under a tenner.

Thank you, loads of suggestions, some that I've heard of lots that I have n't.
I'll investigate the library reservation fee for children - for adults it's now 75p now, the service is really under pressure here. The library will be a great solution if DD gets hooked on a series.

EW, my DD is 12 and a voracious, At 10 sle was addicted to Roman Mysteries by Caroline Lawrence. She also liked (and still does), Skulduggery Pleasant, Vampirates, Percy Jackson, Secret Benedict Society, Artemis Fowl, My Sister the Vampire.

Other stuff that she liked:

Laura Marlin Mysteries (?), Wedding Planners Daughter, Wolven, Time Riders, other stuff by Rick Riordan, Inkheart.

Agree with Takver that abebooks.co.uk is the way to go. You could try some more by Ursula Moray Williams (author of the Little Wooden Horse), especially the Toymaker trilogy (The Toymaker's Daughter, Malkin's Mountain, The Three Toymakers - there's another one, too, but it's a bit different). They seem to be available for about 65p plus £1-something postage. As Takver says, the best deal on Abe Books is if you order books from the same shop to reduce overall postage. Every time I've ordered something from an Abe Books shop it's been if anything a better quality copy than described (I think they're quite cautious in order to avoid negative feedback).

Any other Ursula Moray Williams that people would recommend? (besides Gobbolino & LWH)?

Philippa Pearce has some good ones for younger children - The Battle of Bubble and Squeak etc.

Another tip - look on Book Depository for classics that are still in print in the US but not in the UK. They often don't come up on Amazon UK, but can be bought postage-free from the US through the UK branch of Book Depository, even though it's owned by Amazon.

Lots of reviews of funny books here (also mystery) by age.
www.greatschools.org/articles/?topics=159&language=EN.

One thing I've found about US books is that while their picture books tend to be more expensive than UK ones, their paperbacks seem to be cheaper (probably because they're often printed on crap paper, but still).