Book recommendations needed for 6 year old girl (Marina, Frogs??)

[marialuisa]

DD is nearly 6 and is an exceptionally voracious reader,(sorry to sound so boastful but it is relevant!)I am struggling to find new material for her and would be really grateful for any ideas. Until now she has been happy with lots of "girly trash", e.g. Felicity Wishes, Rainbow Fairies, My Secret Unicorn but during the Christmas holidays she said that although she still enjoys the stories "the books are mostly the same story".

She has worked her way through most of the "usual suspects" for this age group, e.g. Mrs Pepperpot, Pippi Longstocking, Naughty Little Sister so I've more or less run out of steam from dredging my memory banks. DD is very girly and won't go near Roald Dahl and has surprised me by loathing some popular choices such as Clarice Bean and Olga da Polga.

She reads a lot of non-fiction and school are very helpful on this front, but she wants stories too and given she's expressed an interest in moving beyond the realms of the Tiara Club I'd like to help. Sadly our town doesn't have an independent bookshop so we can't go and search there.

TIA

(JackieNo - I meant Michael murporgo and jW probably too young for a 5 year old, Animal Ark is fine if deathly )

Hmm, sounds as though the usual suspects have either been read already or dismissed!

Have you checked out Eva Ibbotson as an author? The best-known one is probably Journey to the River Sea which is a fantastic book and probably not beyond the reach of an able 6yo reader.

If she liked Rumer Godden, has she read The Diddakoi and the books about Japanese dolls -- IIRC Miss Happiness & Miss Flower, and Little Plum. There's an orphan angle to those books as well (and Journey to the River Sea too, come to that) which always goes down well with a certain type of little girl.

Noel Streatfeild is another rich source of girly books -- Thursday's Child is another orphan adventure with a feisty heroine, and then there's Ballet Shoes, White Boots (essentially Ballet Shoes with skates on) and sundry others.

I think Laura Ingalls Wilder might be okay on a 6yo -- I suspect my dd1 was onto them by that age. Start with Little House in the Big Woods which is the 'youngest' of the series and see if she goes for it. And there's Frances Hodgson Burnett by way of classics, particularly A Little Princess and The Secret Garden. The language is possibly a bit advanced for 6, but you could start by getting her the audiobook version from the library which is a good way of easing them into harder reading matter.

hth

dd1 loves Kate diCamillo books - Beacuse of Winn Dixie and The Miraculous Joureny of Edward Tulane - I read them to her but I would think an able reader could manage them fine

They are BRILLIANT btw

Edward Tulane
Winn dixie such a gorgeous gorgeous book

Yes, but the orphan thing in Rumer Godden is all quite gentle and sufficiently set in the past to be unthreatening to my rather over-sensitive DD! 6 year olds don't get to go on trains on their own any more, for example.

I really need a proper bookshop so we can have a rifle through some of the suggestions...

Someone mentioned Usborne a while back - they do some very nice early readers and also some biographical books for more confident readers, eg Florence Nightingale. Ds loved the volumes on notable males at your dd's age MariaLuisa.
Agree with everyone who recommended the Laura Ingalls Wilder series, they are lovely. Also agree with those who said Animal Ark are ghastly - they are apparently written to a format by contract writers, yuck.
Charlotte's Web is a lovely story, and also Lotte and Lisa by Erich Kastner.
Also maybe a good volume of fairy tales - Berlie Doherty did a nice one with illustrations by Jane Ray.
And as well as her novels for children, Joan Aiken has done a beautiful collection of folk tales, A Necklace of Raindrops.

(aha that was the joan aiken book I was thinking of for dd1)

please try the terry jones book - i love it

Ah, over-sensitive as well! That rules out Joan Aitken then -- the Wolves of Willoughby Chase is pretty gothic, and Midnight is a Place is even worse. Great books, though.

Rumer Godden's Miss Happiness & Miss Flower is pretty gentle. Journey to the River Sea is also not scary -- the heroine has some hair-raising adventures, but there are lots of benign adults around too. Even the baddies are dull rather than scary. Ditto Ballet Shoes.

You might want to try getting her into non-fiction as well to widen her possibilities. My ds (7) is obsessed with history and will spend endless hours reading the Ladybird non-fiction series, dated pictures and all. Horrid Histories might appeal. Then again, they're pretty full-on in the yuck department, so it depends on the nature of her sensitivities.

Reading abilities out of sync with actual age can be a problem as lots of what they're capable of reading is way beyond what they're emotionally ready for. It gets even worse when they're 9 or 10, when they've read all the kids' books and the sub-teeny books all seem to major on drugs, violence and under-age sex. Hey-ho. I generally don't censor their reading material, but even I draw the line at Robert Swindells or Melvin Burgess. And a lot of this stuff is to be found in school libraries with never a health warning in sight.

How about E. Nesbit? They're not particularly girly, but cracking good adventures. Lots of children getting trains by themselves, though. Something like The Treasure Seekers, The Wouldbegoods or Five Children and It. I'm actually okay with Jacqueline Wilson I think she deals very intelligently and plausibly with real family situations, and there are always kind adults around to help the children. It's a modern solution to the orphan problem to have a good adventure you really need to get the parents out of the way somehow! But you need to read the individual books yourself first if you have any doubts -- some of them are absolutely fine for a younger child, whereas others are much more teenagey.

Another Jacqueline Wilson for this age group is Connie and the water babies. No orphans, step parents or nastiness, just a bit of jealousy of new babies and fear of swimming pool.

has anyone suggested the sickly sweet Milly molly mandy for girly girls who don't like scary things? a bit bland for my taste but some children like them.

I find the language in Milly Molly Mandy a bit too archaic though - not sure what a 6-year-old would make of it? Might not matter though.

Mine rather enjoy archaic language. E Nesbitt has introduced us to terms such as "No snivelling" and "Buck up". Topsy and Tim being threatened with having their breeches dusted kept them amused for weeks too.

. True.

I mentioned Usborne and again, on looking quickly at the catalogue, classics such as Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights are in here...how about those? They are shown as being for 8+ here.

Incidentally, if anyone is interested in starting selling Usborne books from home, I would be glad to help you...starting comission rate is 24% and there is no hard sell approach

Fennel, ds went though a phase of describing us as ozard oiks cubed after relishing Jennings. Archaic can be good fun - the whole "this child went to Berlin on a train on his own aged eight" scenario is ripe for discussion.

i loved What Katy Did when i was six - though the language might be a bit archaic. the first "little house" book is written in a slightly different style to the others and might be a bit more easy going for a six year old?

Agree it can be good fun, but might need a bit more help, so if she wants to read stuff on her own completely, it might be a bit off-putting (personally, I was always the sort of child who skipped the words I didn't know and made an educated guess from the context, so it wouldn't have bothered me)

The Tilly Beany books by Annie Dalton are nice.
The Little House books (Laura Ingalls Wilder) are definitely worth reading.
Has she read Emily Windsnap? Can't remember who wrote them. Mermaidy but good.

There are a couple of quite nice series about ballet if she is into that. A bit of an advance on the fairy books but not too much so. these ones are good.
Also one Rumer Godden my 6 yr old has just enjoyed is The Fairy Doll which Book People or Red House (can't remember which) has cheap atm.
I understand what you are saying about boarding school books but my dd loves Enid Blyton's Naughtiest Girl books and they aren't as boarding schooly as Malory Towers et al.
She also likes the Borrowers. Will try to think of some more.

How about the first couple of Anne of Green Gables?

Dimanche Diller stories are absolutely fab - my dd was 6 in August and loved those. Some of the vocab is a little hard but the stories are great. If you get them, start with Dimanche Diller (there's a few of them).

Would second the Clever Polly and the Stupid Wolf - we all laughed at that.

Don't have girls, but has she tried "Stig of the Dump" and the Littlenose stories? Can't remember who wrote them, but I remember them fondly. Also Eve Garnett's "The Family from One End Street" books are girly but not full of cute animals.

What about some audio books?

We have the Little White Horse which I only read becasue someone recommended it for DD and, whilst I enjoyed it, she wasn't very impressed. But the type is small and close in the edition we have.

DD has enjoyed listening to books at bedtime for ages and, if we have the print edition, will read along as well.

We went to An Audience with Jacqueline Wilson in the summer and someone asked why she always had splits/broken families etc in her books and she said it was just the way she wrote. I think it is important to vet some of the books that she and Anne Fine write because they cover quite a wide age range and some of the themes are definitely not acceptable for youngr readers, even if they would have little problem with the vocabulary.

Enid, I loved Winn Dixie and most of the others that come up with it at Amazon.

My similarly-aged bookworm is currently loving:

• all the Moomintroll books - don't think anyone's mentioned them in the posts below? The Book People were recently doing a total bargain set of 6 paperbacks & no house should be without them!

• Enid Blyton, Magic Faraway Tree and The Wishing Chair (dd was given compendium versions, three-books-in-one, from Amazon, and the print doesn't seem too tiny);

• the Varjak Paw series, about a cat that has to rediscover an ancient tao of catpower and thereby defeat Evil. It has villains in it, but they're cats, so it may not be too scary? (Credit for scummymummy on that one); and

• The Magic Pudding, an Australian children's classic from the 40s (present from clever current nanny) & published in a series with various others, inc. one called Snugglepot and Cuddlepie. Very cosy.

I have The Family From One End Street waiting for her when the Enid Blytons run out. Also will find her Miss Happiness and Miss Flower, as that's right up her street too.

Another thing that was a wild success this summer was Gwynedd Rae's Mary Plain series, the one about the mischevious young bear from the Bern zoo, with lots of lovely rebus-y letters to decode. You might need a library or second-hand shop for those, though.

Just to add - with an early good reader, retro (ie mid-20th c books) always works - the content is fairly automatically the right level, and if the language is a little stretching, well I think that's no bad thing.

So, some more author ideas on that principle:

• Edward Ardizzone
• Noel Streatfeild
• Eleanor Farjeon
• Phillipa Pearce (Tom's Midnight Garden)
• Mary Norton (The Borrowers)

Have found marvellous NZ children's library site (here ), which among other things lists all prizewinning books for NZ, Aus, US and UK.