Trying to help my daughter download some books for an upcoming flight/trip. She is veto-ing all my suggestions. She has been on a murder binge so she needs a break. From her: no murder, no fantasy, no series, wants a standalone, and she doesn't want anything too sad. I am okay with her reading romance, but ideally nothing too explicit. She did read some Colleen Hoover at camp but I don't want to make those suggestions, let her find that on her own.
by tgbarbie
16 Comments
Anne of green gables
*The Pushcart War*? A fake historical chronicle of the struggles between truckers and pushcart peddlers in NYC.
*The Eyes and the Impossible*. The characters in this are all animals, but they do not perform magic and their thoughts seem reasonable for their species.
rainbow rowell?
Suite Scarlet by Maureen Johnson, maybe? Contemporary ya about a girl whose family runs a hotel
14yo me LOVED Jane Eyre.
She’d like Twilight even tho it’s a bit fantasy and has many parts. My daughter is loving it and she’s 11
How about Jane Austen? Pride and Prejudice, Emma, Sense and Sensibility are obvious ones.
If she likes historical fiction, Luxe is really good but it is a series of four books. It’s set in the 1890s in New York and follows four society girls
Sherman Alexie’s Absolutely True Diary of a Part Time Indian fits all the requirements and is an incredibly engaging read. I picked it up when my daughter was reading it (around your daughter’s age) and couldn’t put it down.
Michael Chrighton books, like Jurassic Park or Andromeda Strain. They often have a streak of mystery but no murder, not tear jerkers, and they are fast paced so they quickly engage you.
I think I was about this age when my mother gave me Rebecca. However, it is a little murdery, you just don’t know that at first. Might be a hook, though.
ETA: my mother sold it to me as ‘a ghost story of sorts’.
Feeling Sorry for Celia or The Year of Secret Assignments by Jaclyn Moriarty. Technically they’re part of a series, but they’re only loosely connected, can be read in any order and work fine as standalones.
Life as we knew it by Susan Beth Pfeiffer is a book about a girl in Pennsylvania, who lives through the moon being hit by an asteroid and all of the environmental fallout that occurs when the gravity of the moon, pulling the tides in the magma under the crust of the Earth changes everything.
It’s part of a series, but the second book does not talk about this girl at all. It is the exact same situation but a teen boy in New York City and his experience of the same events.
The books read as standalone Books.
This is my first time using the Goodreads bot in this group so forgive me if it doesn’t work!
{{Ella Minnow Pea by Mark Dunn}} — literary fiction
{{The Adventures of Amina Al Sirafi by Shannon Chakraborty}} — pirates, a bit of romance (fade to black sex scene), adventure. It is technically fantasy but more focused on the pirate and adventure aspects I think. Either way, it’s a good book!
{{River Sing Me Home by Eleanor Shearer}} — historical fiction. The themes are sad, naturally, but I didn’t cry.
{{The Pull of the Stars by Emma Donoghue}} — historical fiction
{{Where the Crawdads Sing by Delia Owens}} — historical fiction. I think there might be a fade to black sexual scene.
Horse books. Lots of equestrian fiction.
Anna and The French Kiss is a sweet romance without any explicit scenes about a girl from the US attending a school in France for a year (even though she does not speak the language). It’s written by Stephanie Perkins.