我的女儿Fiona写了好书推荐，借平台推荐给小朋友们。
This is the first book to the Harry Potter series. Harry Potter, who lives a miserable life with his neat freak aunt Petunia Dursley, his violent Uncle Vernon, and his spoiled cousin Dudley, suddenly gets flung into the quirking wizarding world on his eleventh birthday. Starting from there, he faces much; his life for the next seven years are more eventful and dramatic than he could ever imagine; this is year one, with three-headed dogs, dragons, and an introductory to our world we will come to know and love. Shrouds of mystery get solved, teens go through a familiar yet totally new and quirky school setting, and young Harry faces the first year of a journey that will take him to great highs and lows. This book is amazingly original, pulling references to all things we’ve known before yet putting them together to make a totally new and complex world that is endlessly peculiar and interesting. The plot goes on to be developed expertly to be complex and intriguing at every turn with every book in the series. With ups and downs of all kinds, this series takes the ‘magic’ theme to a whole new level. And through the series, J.K. Rowling plays with themes of prejudice, death, sacrifice, and the sheer complexity of human nature that have always been and always will be no matter magic or muggle.
This is the first book in the Percy Jackson and the Olympians series. Percy Jackson is labeled unfairly as a delinquent, with ADHD and dyslexia, and has the worst luck ever with the seemingly supernatural. But one night he gets taken to Camp Half-Blood and realizes that it’s because he’s the son of a Greek god- and trouble in the divine world is definitely stewing. This book relives boring mythology with modern, and hilarious, twists and gives clever inferences on the dusty old myths, and uses them to make something more. From Medusa cooking fast food and running a garden gnome emporium to the Olympians residing in the sixth hundredth floor of the Empire State Building, you would really be surprised with this book’s creativity.
Matilda was far from useless, unlike how she was seen- she was a prodigy, with knowledge levels the same as eighth graders at first grade and an even higher intelligence, and nicer than most kids could ever be. Just when she seems to be doomed as a target to a child-abusing headmistress, a power never known before is tossed into Matilda’s six-year-old hands. This book puts things to the extreme, with the good guys being the best and the antagonists being the absolute worst- Roald Dahl style. We see angels and devils in the form of characters thrown into this book. Excitable and clever, we get immense satisfaction from every comeback the protagonists pull. Being written three decades ago, this is also a new setting than ours, in 1980s England.
A British boy journeys to Norway with his Norwegian grandmother. Very soon he finds that witches, just like in the stories that his grandmother always told him, exist. Not only that, all the British witches, under the one and only grand high witch, are staying in the same hotel as he is, coming up with more schemes to kill children. This boy and his grandmother decide put an end to all this- and in the process, some animal transformation is utilized. This book is original in it’s system like the Sorcerer’s Stone, but is not using any sort of previous tropes. Constructing an entire other world, one gruesome and chilling, from ground up, this book builds its own rules. And as it goes on, we see them broken as well, in the most satisfying Dahl-style way.
Jonas and his family unit lives in a seemingly utopian world. Everything is planned out. No one gets caught in war, no one lives in poverty, no one will ever fall out of normalcy. Even death seems to be avoided, with citizens being ‘released’ upon getting old. But at the Ceremony of Twelve, Jonas gets the title of the “Receiver of Memory”, and with the help of the mysterious “Giver”, finds the horrifying underlay of his community- death, war, and poverty suddenly seems more humane, with all that the community has hidden from him, all the measures that they took. This book turns questions long asked- what is the perfect community? How far can we master our lives, without life mastering us, and eventually fading away from this world?- into a short but deep novel that shows just how much we have taken for granted and how far we could go- good or bad.