I recall asking for Les Miserables at the school library and being informed it was not a children's book. The first week of junior high I marched into the library, checked it out, and read it easily. It stretched me in some ways (old-fashioned quirks), but it wasn't difficult vocabulary or content.
There are several kids in DD's second grade class reading Potter now. Some parents will have them stop after a few (which I tried, but DD was desperate! And wasn't disturbed at all. She's stone cold. She loved them! But I guess she gets its fiction. And she certainly "comprehended" them!)
Same!
Except, yeah-- my dad was my biblioholic enabler parent.
DD is similarly stone cold-- she quailed at the "giant snake" in the
film version of HP2, and it put her off the books for about six months, when she was five. At 7yo, she finished book seven
faster than I did. She stayed up all night after the midnight release. Yes. We let her. It was July-- and I don't know how I'd have stopped her.
By the time she was ten, she was happily blazing Dickensian fiction, which is every bit as harrowing as Les Mis. She definitely "gets" that part of things-- for her, she is a person who enjoys vicariously experiencing the full range of the human condition, I'd say. She's been like this since she learned to read. I've
never restricted her reading materials other than to mention that something had "sexual content that you might not be comfortable with yet."
I was the one bawling like a baby for Dobby and Snape, by the way.
I'm completely mystified by the assumption that young fluent readers
must not be "comprehending" what they are reading. In what sense?? I mean, I can recall DD telling me all about books that she was reading when she was five and six-- so I
know that she was really doing it, and really into them.
