I have a twelve-year-old son who loves to read. Twelve is an awesome age for reading. The whole world of children’s fiction remains open to him, and the world of books for grownups is slowly opening, too. Fart jokes remain hilarious, yet his vocabulary is huge.
(The sad part is that he doesn’t want me to read books out loud anymore, because he can read faster than I talk, and he doesn’t want to wait for a chapter each evening.)
I want to provide smart scaffolding to the world of grownup books so that he doesn’t start to feel trapped in a library section that feels repetitive. (I experience that and it contributed to my lack of a reading life between high school and my 30s. If you’re thinking ‘that’s a long fallow period,’ the answer is YES.)
Murderbot (IMO) fits right into this bridge strategy. It’s action-packed (which he loves). The main character is an ethical person (er, bot). The violence is not too graphic, the swearing minimal (nonexistent? I can’t remember any at this moment) and there’s no sexual violence. If he likes it, there’s a whole set of books he can read that feature Murderbot!
These days, blogging is sort of shouting into the void, but if a real person with tweens happens to read this, drop in the comments what grownup books they like to read!
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