So, my daughter has gotten done with reading picture books before bed and wants me to read her more involved stories. I've tried a couple, but they keep misfiring, mostly in my opinion, due to awkward and frankly boring writing. It's not just her that's bored by these, I'm bored by them too.
She likes action and adventure stuff, martial arts, magic, robots, vehicles, battling, outdoors, exploring, etc. For television shows she likes Pokemon, Voltron, Hot Wheels, Gabby's Dollhouse, Avatar: The Last Airbender, Hilda, and She-Ra. Indifferent to female or male protagonist as long as they have some sort of agency.
What we have tried:
We have read some of the Zoey and Sassafras books, everyone I know has been raving about these… they're okay, but they always drag and get caught up in making lists and setting up experiments, which I get is important, but it's also boring. We want to read about a girl and her cat saving a unicorn, not proper wound care and managing a bunch of petri dishes (over and over again multiple times at that) to achieve optimal bacterial growth. Important stuff, but also pretty boring stuff.
Finishing up Legends of Lotus Island, The Temple of Secrets right now, I thought this was going to be a good one, but it's five chapters of story spread over twenty chapters. There is zero description of anything. There are like ten to fifteen characters and they all say exactly one line each in turn at every conversation and none of them are ever described or really moved beyond occaisionally chiming in for their one line. The lengthy filler dialogue, almost total lack of description, and lack of much actual action / adventure really kinda killed this one for me.
We've read a couple of pokemon chapter books and they're okay, but they're almost always lifted line for line from episodes of the shows which she almost knows by heart, so she isn't much interested in essentially reading the script she already knows. I almost feel like finding some fanfics or something would be better.
Stuff from my own childhood doesn't seem helpful anymore because it was like… Madeline L'Engle, Roald Dahl, ans the Boxcar Children, which I feel like you need a certain bit of reference for and even then comes off as often dated and weird. There is such a dizzying array of children's fiction out there now I'm not even sure where to start.
She is 4 and I would be reading a chapter a night as a bedtime story, so while people getting hurt is okay, please nothing with overly specific trauma or high stakes life-or-death situations that are going to be nightmare fuel.
Tl;dr: What are some good modern action/adventure chapter books or series I can read to my kid before bedtime?
by uglynekomata