Keeping your daughter interested in reading can be difficult in today's busy world, but providing exciting, relevant, and stimulating books is vital to building a strong mind. These ten books will keep your daughter so engrossed, inspired, and challenged that she'll surely ask for more.
Strong minds equal strong women, and strong minds come from reading great books. For young women, reading can provide insight into growing up, introduce them to new cultures, and improve their reasoning and critical thinking skills. But in this age of constant activity, how do you get your daughter to sit down and read just for the pleasure of it? By giving her fantastic books! It's up to you to show your daughter that reading is more than just another assignment to get out of the way before she can instant message with her friends on the internet.
I'll admit, I'm a bookworm and read everything in sight, including cereal boxes and obituaries, and I know it's not realistic to expect every girl to love reading, but, by providing your daughter with the best books, it is possible to help her enjoy it. It's easy to expose your daughter to great literature when she's young: you read it aloud to her at bedtime. But keeping her interested in books when she decides she's too old for bedtime stories is a little more challenging. The old classics are still wonderful books, but many young women find them too boring, didactic, syrupy, or moralistic to be enjoyable. Today’s young women want books that are exciting, honest, stimulating, and relevant to their lives.
As the parent of a pre-teen, I spend many hours reading books for young adults and weeding out the ones I think my daughter will devour from the ones I know she will never finish reading. In the process, I try to maintain my own high standards for literature: I want my daughter to be challenged, motivated, inspired, and perhaps, even disturbed, by what she reads. Hopefully, my list of the ten great modern novels that no girl should miss will help you in your struggle to keep your daughter reading.
Becoming Naomi Leon, by Pam Munoz Ryan
For ages 9 to 12
This story about a young girl’s search for her father has all the elements young women are looking for: an alcoholic mother, a loving grandmother, exotic cultures, and a strong, triumphant main character.
When Naomi’s mother returns to claim her, Gram takes her to Mexico to search for father. The annual radish-carving festival in Oaxaca City is the perfect setting for Naomi’s coming-of-age revelation of “who I was meant to be.”