Good Books for Pre-Teens and Middle School

Several of us parents have been particularly grateful to American Girls for writing The Care and Keeping of You, an A to Z of what girls need to know as they enter int young womanhood. The book covers the fun stuff like hair and nails and the necessary stuff that is sometimes hard to ask your mom, like how to use a tampon. The book breaks down the stages of pre-menstral development and seems to have given our daughters a lot of self confidence about the whole process.

I have found another book that I can’t wait to run out and get my daughter. Kiss My Math, by Danica McKeller. You may remember her as the girl who was Wynnie on the Wonder Years. She grew up and became a beautiful math wiz. Thanks to her father, my daughter has a good grasp on math, but this book also talks about keeping up your faith in yourself as a girl. Don’t dummy yourself down. It does this along with explaining pre-algebra in easy to grasp concepts for girls. Her first book is similar, but is middle school math. I avoided math as I got older and steered clear of career paths that I probably would have loved because of it. I wish I had a resource that had encouraged me to stick with math and had shown me how. These books are getting rave reviews from women.

http://www.amazon.com/Kiss-My-Math-Showing-Pre-Algebra/dp/1594630496/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1232721574&sr=8-1

Do you have any suggestions for books that can help girls navigate the rough waters of the middle school years?

Books That Influenced My Life

My niece, Mikaela, is turning sixteen and she is having a Coming of Age party.  I thought about several things that would be appropriate, but most seemed trite and without meaning.  I kept thinking about the things that have influenced my life: experiences and people.  Well, those can’t be handed to someone else, and writing a letter with all of that in it can come across as condescending.  Mikaela is a smart and cynical young woman with a sharp wit.  The letter really didn’t seem appropriate for her. 

Books, however, are probably the third biggest influence in my life.  A book is something that I can hand over and, hopefully, share some of the magic that I experienced when I read the author.  You can also get literature in beautifully bound editions that can be handed down to another generation.  A book is timeless, classic and meaningful – a perfect gift.  And then I stood in the old book store looking at rows and rows of masters in print.  I clutched Walden by Henry David Thoreau, which is what I had come to pick up, but I was frozen with indecision.  Here was Dickens, Carrol, Proust, and Shakespeare, Orwell, and Morrison.  Great voices from across time, and here they all were full of thought provoking ideas and wisdom.   How could I pick just one?  Why should I pick up Walden instead of the poetry of Maya Angelou? 

I ran my fingers across the gold embossed spines and flipped through T.S. Elliot’s  “Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats”.  I found “The Wasteland” by T.S. Elliot and then remembered how depressed it made me feel when I read it and kept my hold on Walden.  For in the end, that is what I am hoping to pass along,  how Walden made me feel.   It gave me inner peace and reminded me how precious life can be and that every moment had something to offer. 

Mikaela will bring her own experience to Thoreau’s words and she will have her own interpretations.  She will read and she will think and she will come away with something new.    It is not something that I will have bought for her or made for her, but something she will have made for herself and added to her humanity.  That compilation of life experiences which makes us unique.  May Walden and many others continue to give her something new every time she reads it as she builds her life experiences and become ever more human.

Is there a book that you have read that has impacted your ideas?  What would you recommend to other people?