Recommend a book?

[resonant]

The kidlet is looking for books to buy a friend. What we know about the friend's reading habits: She's turning eleven, and she's all into the Twilight series.

So. Rec us meaty-yet-fifth-grade-appropriate books that are better than Twilight?

Comments

[vass]

I second everyone else's recs for Tamora Pierce, Terry Pratchett, Robin McKinley, and Diane Duane. (Tamora Pierce seems particularly appropriate for a Twilight reader, with her emphasis on sexual freedom with responsibility, reproductive choice, and careers for women other than motherhood.)

Nnedi Okorafor Mbachu's Zahrah the Windseeker is awesome, has a strong female character, and she probably hasn't read it before.

Catherine Jinks's Pagan quintet is wonderful. The main character's male, but there are good female characters. Pagan Kidrouk is a Christian Arab, born in Bethlehem ("Don't worry, sir, it wasn't in a stable.") and he's assigned as a squire to a Templar knight during the second crusade. The fifth book, Pagan's Daughter, has a female main character, but it won't make sense if you haven't read the rest. These are Australian novels, but I think they've been published in the US too. I should mention that they're nothing at all like Twilight, but they're so good.

And while I'm recommending books for eleven-year-olds, that was when I first read Brian Caswell's A Cage of Butterflies. It was published by Queensland University Press a long time ago, so it might be difficult to find, but I absolutely recommend it to anyone who likes science fiction. It's about a think-tank of genius teenagers who make contact with a group of 'autistic' younger children living in the same compound, who turn out to be not so autistic after all, and the teenagers' battle to save the younger kids.