Thanks so much for all your suggestions, I really appreciate it. Because I've never really 'got' fiction (I know, what's to get right?!) I have no grounding in what's good. The flip side of that is that I've never been too fussed about a book's 'status' or reading level and so I completely agree with the idea of books not needing to be high level (her favourite books are the Harry Potter books, the Montmaray historical fiction series ... and a book called What Bumosaur Is That ...) and that's the way we've always approached things - it's just that she's hit a point with her reading where she's not finding less complex books satisfying and she has over a dozen half read books scattered across the floor. She's read, read and re-read Harry Potter, was through all the main Enid Blyton series, Tom's Midnight Garden, the Rats of Nhim etc by 5.5, has read the Hobbit, LOTR, the Narnia books, classics like Little Women, collections of greek myths etc. She has read the Hunger Games, which she loved and half of Catching Fire, which she found to be a bit much of the same thing (other than some preliminary research on what a book entails I largely trust her to self censor as she has always done so very capably). She's read every historical fiction book she can get her hands on - but is finding the ones aimed at elementary and middle school a bit formulaic and I've been unsure where to go next with those. So I'll happily give most things a go. I think for dd, who spends most of her day hiding what she can do and being super-duper socially 'acceptable', reading is her one way of extending herself and exploring the world - good and bad - in an inconspicuous way (her school encourages her reading choices and she is in a good gifted cohort so no one thinks twice about what she brings in). Thanks too, La Texan, for the scholastic book wizard suggestion - I knew what you meant in your first post
Thanks too for the Sophie's World idea, madeinuk, I've got that on a shelf somewhere - I have been keen to try her on something more definitively philosophical.
Off to the library for me!
Thanks again.
