No, You Don’t Automatically Owe Your Parents Love and Respect: A Reading List
Bug’s recent post about Turning Red, and especially all the thoughtful responses, made me decide to put together a list of Middle Grade and YA novels in which the parents are negligent, imperfect, judgmental, narrow-minded, and/or some combination of all four, and aren’t shown to be in the right by the end of the story. More importantly, while the child protagonist may face pressure from other characters to help/accept their parent, the book overall doesn’t suggest this is automatically The Right Thing To Do. I decided to leave off books where parents are straight-up abusive (like A Step From Heaven, What Jamie Saw, Rules of Survival, and The Great Gilly Hopkins,) because the parent(s) in those stories are unambiguously in the wrong—it’s clear to the reader, if not the protagonist, pretty much from the beginning that these are not good parents. This list obviously isn’t exhaustive, and I tried to include as many books as possible that were “genre fiction” (fantasy, sci fi, mysteries, adventures, most historical fiction) that subverts putting the burden on the child to accept their parent’s flaws, because those stories aren’t nearly as common as realistic fiction that tackles the imperfect parent.
The first section are Middle Grade novels, the second are YA novels and the last section are novels for adults that have child protagonists and are Alex Award recipients, an award “given to books written for adults that have special appeal to young adults”. I also tried to list the books in sections one and two approximately in order of suggested reading age, from youngest to oldest. Even though I have a bee in my bonnet about Middle Grade books being retroactively labelled as YA, I did include a few Middle Grade novels in the YA category (like Silent to the Bone and Homecoming,) which would almost certainly have been published as YA if the category had existed when the books came out. Animorphs isn’t included because I’m assuming if you’re reading this you’re already a fan of the series.
Final Caveat: I would strongly recommend all of these books, but some have aspects that haven’t aged well, ie, The Planet of Junior Brown was published in 1971 and its attitude towards mental illness is accordingly outdated, and The Letter, The Witch, and the Ring’s portrayal of gender exploration is similarly outdated, but again, it came out in 1972, and for the time it was incredibly subversive and ground-breaking. Â
The “My Teacher” series by Bruce Coville, especially My Teacher Is an Alien
The Letter, the Witch, and the Ring by John Bellairs
Island of the Aunts by Eva Ibbotson
ParaNorman from LAIKA Studios
Ella Enchanted by Gail Carson Levine
Deep and Dark and Dangerous by Mary Downing Hahn Â
The True Confessions of Charlotte Doyle by Avi
Hey, Kiddo by Jarrett Krosoczka
The Prince and the Dressmaker by Jen Wang
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Silverwing and Sunwing by Kenneth Oppel
His Dark Materials trilogy by Phillip Pullman (although The Book of Dust: La Belle Sauvage unfortunately ret-cons this to some extent)
Silent to the Bone by E.L Konigsburg
Lizzie Bright and the Buckminster Boy by Gary D. Schmidt
The Planet of Junior Brown by Virginia Hamilton
Homecoming by Cynthia Voight
Tangerine by Edward Bloor
Dead Girls Don’t Write Letters by Gail Giles
The Rest of Us Just Live Here by Patrick Ness
The Pigman by Paul Zindel
Hero by S.L. Rottman
Burning Up by Caroline B. Cooney (a lot of Cooney’s books subvert the Mother Knows Best trope)
The Secret Life of Bees by Sue Monk Kidd
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The Death of Bees by Lisa O’Donnell (not a sequel to The Secret Life of Bees : )
Help for the Haunted by John Searles















