Teenage books without swearing

[Colleger]

Or profanity? Although I think that would be impossible to find with the latter.

My 11 year old son is very gifted in English and has been born into a family of English dunces! He is an avid reader of spy novels and has exhausted most of the teenage range. I've been pretty unimpressed by some of the cherub novels which are aimed at kids as young as 9. They talk about sniffing glue, being horny and other crude phrases. Of course I only find that out when he asks what these things mean. Sigh...

He bought some spy novels in the adult section today and when he got them home they included frequent use of the C word and frequent swearing in general. So we're back to finding teenage literature but would like to find well written stuff with florid language - it seems many novels are written to attract non readers so the literary content is weak - but that is as swear-free as possible.

Any ideas? Is this the right place to post it?

Depends on the Anne McCaffrey books I think, iirc the Dragonrider of Pern books have odd bits of sex in them albeit offscreen (when the Dragons mate, it trickles down to their riders) and there's definitely strong allusions of rape/sexual violence in a couple of the novels. It's been a while since I read them though.

Will second all the Skullduggery Pleasant/Young Bond/Percy Jackson recs.

That common sense website is amazing - thanks to the member who posted it! :)

Yeah shit! Yes thinking about it there is SandM in one Dick Francis and some very dodgy sexual stuff referred to in one of the modern ones. Pretty violent too.

Like someone said about the Hgames it sort of washes over you at that age. You just get carried along with the story.

Bartimaeus Trilogy (Jonathan Stroud)

Mortal Chaos (Matt Dickinson)

Animal Farm

Dunkirk, Battle of Britain (James Holland)

Diary of Adrian Mole......will lead you nicely into a PSHE discssion about teenage years..!!

My DSs also love Malorie Balckman books, Sophie McKenzie books (esp The Medusa Project), but they do have a small amount of swearing in them.

The Time Riders books (Alex Scarrow) are excellent. As are the Invisible Detective and Time Runners series (Justin Richards).

Yes, loving this commonsense web! If only I'd known about it all this time!

Old school, but Rosemary Sutcliffe wrote some very fine adventure/ historical novels for " young people" . "Eagle of the Ninth" is perhaps the best known, but "Mark of the Horse Lord" is good.
Diana wynne Jones has writen a shed load of good books too. Lots of magic but not lots of swearing . This reviewer says they read some age 10 or so, I didn't start reading them till mid teens. I still enjoy them now as an adult.

Has he read the Swallows and Amazon series? As the children get older the adventures become a bit more adventurous. Great Northern, We didn't mean to go to Sea in particular. I was reading these age 11- 13.

As an avid teenage reader I read quite a lot of autobiography. From James Herriot type humorous stuff thro to second world war german teenagers stories.

Philip Pullman? DS read the Northern Lights trilogy last year & loved it.