Kids' Picks: August

Five Minutes For Books is inviting bloggers to share what their children are reading.  Here are some of their summer reading choices: 

Elder daughter (17):  On her break between summer classes, she read a book for pleasure!  And she picked one of my personal favorites:  Lavinia by Ursula LeGuin.  She liked it as much as I do, and asked me to recommend similar stuff.  (Not easy--I've come up with The Penelopiad  by Margaret Atwood so far;  other suggestions are welcome.)

Younger daughter (14):  Is currently interested in 1920s and 1940s settings.  She's reading The Girl is Murder, one of a series of detective stories with a teenage protagonist set in the 1940s, and Vixen, one of the Flappers series, set (yes) in the 1920s.  She says she likes the period settings, but has asked me to recommend something of better quality set in those eras with young protagonists.  She's recently read The Great Gatsby, and I've suggested Alice Adams, (which I love) but nothing else comes to mind.  Suggestions?

Elder son (11):  He's in the middle of H. G. Wells' The War of the Worlds.  I slipped this into his pile,  and he's liking it so far.  Hugely into ghost stories right now, he's also making his way through The Random House Book of Ghost Stories.

Younger son (8):  Recently finished Pinocchio by Carlo Collodi.  My fiction hater, he decided to read this only because the Puffin Classics edition we have contains a lot of illustrations!  His recent nonfiction choices include Stealth Fighters and Bombers, U-2 Planes, and UH-60 Black Hawks... you get the idea.  Oh, and I pulled these off the library shelf to make him laugh, and he took them home and read them:  Junk Food by Vicki Cobb, and The Story Behind Toilets by Elizabeth Raum.