This month for Reading Wildly, my staff and I read gentle reads. What do I mean by gentle reads? We classified this month in three ways:
- Teen books that do not contain mature language and situations
- Books for young readers who are reading way above their grade level
- Christian fiction
I believe the genre originally suggested for this month was Christian fiction and I expanded it a little bit to include some more options. We ended up sharing books from all three areas that we considered gentle fiction. Of course, you can never guarantee to anyone that a book is going to be absolutely free of anything that might offend - it's impossible to know every thing that could potentially offend someone.
One thing I was proud of this month is that when we went to make our suggestion list for each other last month, we had a lot of ideas for children's books and very few ideas for teen books. Most of the books we all ended up sharing at this meeting were teen books. Without my asking them, staff gravitated towards the area where we had less experience. That's exactly the idea behind this program!
I'm going to post two separate lists here: one for teens and one for children reading above grade level. These lists contain not only the books we read, but also books that were suggested by my staff last month. I included all of these titles in our Evernote lists and I've encouraged staff to add to the lists as they read gentle fiction throughout the year.
Here's what we read and suggested:
Gentle Teen Reads (includes Christian fiction):
- A Simple Song by Melody Carlson (Christian Fiction)
- Ten Miles Past Normal by Frances O'Roark Dowell
- Pies and Prejudice (Mother-Daughter Book Club) by Heather Vogel Frederick
- A World Away by Nancy Grossman (Christian Fiction)
- My Lady Jane by Cynthia Hand, Brodi Ashton, and Jodi Meadows
- Anomaly by Krista McGee (Christian Fiction)
- Anne of Green Gables by LM Montgomery
- Shadow on the Mountain by Margi Preus
Books for Younger Kids Reading Above Grade Level
- Little Women by Louisa May Alcott
- Mr. Popper's Penguins by Richard Atwater
- The Penderwicks by Jeanne Birdsall
- The Birchbark House by Louise Erdrich
- Escape from Mr. Lemoncello's Library by Chris Grabenstein
- Absolutely Almost by Lisa Graff
- The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame
- Winterfrost by Michelle Houts
- Up a Road Slowly by Irene Hunt (Newbery)
- Alvin Ho (series) by Lenore Look
- Keeper of the Lost Cities by Shannon Messenger
- Marty Maguire Has Too Many Pets by Kate Messner (and others by this author)
- Greenglass House by Kate Milford
- Winnie-the-Pooh by A.A. Milne
- Anne of Green Gables by L.M. Montgomery
- The Turtle of Oman by Naomi Shihab Nye
- Nuts to You by Lynne Rae Perkins
What would you add to our lists of gentle reads?