Books of the Teens: Family Fiction

Our sons turned 13 and 17 this year.  We still read as a family in the evening - the remainder of the earliest bedtime reading traditions - into this year.  With no one around to tell any of us that this should stop, we just kept doing the thing that's brought us so much collective pleasure over the years.  We're in a pause right now and might be done forever.  There are fewer evenings when we are all at home now, so reading a book together takes months (see below for an all-time record).

The kinds of things we read changed vastly over this decade, and it makes me sad that I haven't kept records of all of those books like I have of the books I read "for myself."  If I did, I might have more to recommend.  Still, these are solid recs for reading with tweens and on up to teens.

Best Family Fiction 

Little Women, Louisa May Alcott, 1868, read in 2018

I discovered and loved Little Women (for credit!) in college.  Rereading books doesn't generally excite me, and I almost never do it.  But we have tried to choose material carefully for our precious and persistent family ritual.  Rereading it, I remembered all of the things I loved about it and some of the parts that I wished were different.  This being the longest book we've read as a family, it was rather a slog.  We had it from the library and we renewed it 13 times, which means it has been in our house for more than 39 weeks.  The characters are interesting, and those who don't start out that way do evolve, which is nice.  Alcott was a prophetess against the bounds of gender roles, and the strictures put on the female characters by their environment still drive me nuts.  The March family's genteel poverty is one of the most romantic things I've ever encountered.  Yes, the ending is bolted on and sad in its own way but this is still the great American novel.


The War that Saved my Life and The War I Finally Won, Kimberly Brubaker Bradley, 2015/2017, read in 2017/2018

A simple two-part series, these flawed books appealed to all four of us.

I sometimes had to pass these books on to someone else in the family to read because I got too choked up.  The first novel tells the story of Ada and her brother Jamie, who get evacuated from war-threatened London to a small town in the English countryside.  Their mother is an abusive moron barmaid.  Ada has a club foot and is not allowed to leave the house.  Though the welcome is not always warm in the countryside, their evacuation achieves the goal of saving them from the violence of war.  There are worse fates than war, though, and the evacuation plays a role there, too.  The children are taken in by a gruff woman named Susan, whose stiff-upper-lip practical care reminded me so frequently of my mother-in-law.  It's a touching story that the whole family enjoyed.

This book continues the story of Ada and Jamie, two kids subjected to different levels of abuse by a low-resource barmaid in London.  Ada is the emotional heart of the two books, and I'm very impressed with how Brubaker Bradley depicts the uneven path of a child recovering from trauma and trying to learn how to trust people and situations more.  Her characters surprise the reader in nuanced portraits of evolving behavior.  The books may be accused of anachronistically infusing current social and political mores into World War 2-era England (town and country), but I admit to rooting for that more often than not when it happens in these stories.  And she's not alone.  Exhibit A: Downton Abbey.  If there's a theme in these two books, it is empathy in some people overcoming its lack in others.  Our whole family, with boys aged 15 and 11 at the time, have been completely engaged by the storytelling.


The Incorrigible Children series, Maryrose Wood, 2009-2018, finished in 2019

 I won't attempt to review a six-book series here, but everyone in my competent family also enjoyed these.  They are fanciful and imaginative with good character development and enough plot to keep the readers engaged.  The pace sometimes flags, but they're generally winningly off-the-wall books.  There is winking humor that the boys understood pretty well throughout.  The suspense will grip younger children more than the high schooler and middle schooler who ended up reading the final book, but it's not like they told us to stop reading either.  Might be more of an upper primary read than a series for really young kids.