Welcome to Recommended Reads!

Hi! My name is the Book Girl and I am the creator of Recommended Reads.

I wouldn't be who I am today if I hadn't grown up, for the most part, friendless and alone. I blame my dad. When I was about six he took it upon himself to make me literate, something I think he's regretted ever since, because I don't think I looked up from a book until about 7th grade. He probably realized his mistake when I started going half-blind at age ten because of how many nights I had spent squinting at pages in the dim blue light of an alarm clock. I was the classic Book Girl- the one who sat reading through recess, who brought books to lunch, who got unnecessarily excited about English class, who was best friends with the librarian. I was lucky enough to have a very positive experience through all my early schooling, but I was so busy reading I tended to ignore the kids around me, giving me a very advanced vocubulary that I struggled to use because of my self-taught social awkwardness. I improved, though, just in time for the most exhausting and ridiculous period in any child-adult's life, the teen years. I've managed to survive those too and somehow I'm now facing down the dragon called college admissions. In preparing for these admissions I realized something- I've been so busy dwelling internally that I've not tried to share my skills with the people around me. I decided to embark on a passion project. The issue there is that I'm too introverted to start an in-person outreach program or start a club where I might be forced to socialize, so I decided to create a website where I can write down my words and not have to actually make any eye contact. It wasn't hard at all to think of what kind of impact I wanted to make, because I've had a particular problem in mind for my entire life.

As a child I literally read my way through the shelves of my elementary school library and walked out of my public library with a stack ten high. When I ran out of age appropriate material, I started to read the classics I kept hearing about, and those were by far my favorites. I discovered The Giver, Holes, The Secret Garden, Hatchet, Old Yeller, The Boxcar Children, and who knows how many more. I can still remember reading Animal Farm in one sitting as a second grader and deciding it was my new favorite standalone (and yes, I knew exactly what the pigs represented). I was impossibly proud of what I read myself. But the books that truly built me were the ones that were read aloud to me. My grandma decided that I would join the family George MacDonald and C.S. Lewis Fan Club and so now some of my earliest memories come from The Princess and the Goblins and The Back of the North Wind. Then over the course of several years we worked our way through the Chronicles of Narnia (The Voyage of the Dawn Treader is my favorite, but I loved the dark twist of The Silver Chair). My mom and I read together almost every night of my childhood. She took me through all her old favorites and then many classics she had never read herself. We started when I was barely old enough to be reading myself with the Six of Crowns series and from there we read The Land of Stories, The Island of the Blue Dolphins, A Wrinkle in Time, Little House on the Praire, Anne of Green Gables, The Call of the Wild and White Fang, The Phantom Tollbooth, Harry Potter, The Hunger Games, The Maze Runner, and others I can't even remember right now. She's infamous for finding out I was saving up to buy my own puppy and deciding to get us Where the Red Fern Grows without Googling the ending. When that ineveitably ended in tears and lifelong trauma, she tried to distract me with Bridge to Terabithia- and didn't Google that ending either. We were both caught off guard.

These books made me a straight-A student, polite, attentitive, and quick to learn. I don't care about that. I care that I am incredibly empathetic, know how to recognize others emotions and help them feel comforted, and don't tend to worry about the typical everyday teenage stressors because I know that there are bigger issues out there. I am the way that I am not because of my genetics or how I was parented but because books rewrote my mind and gave me a thousand pairs of eyes to see with instead of only one. That is why I love being the Book Girl.

But it was very obvious to me growing up that almost none of the kids around me shared my experience. While I read more than anyone else I've ever met, the other children I went to school with who did read were the most stable, smart, and happy that I knew. Everyone else seemed much less academic, more prone to behavioral issues or mental struggles, and to be honest, well- childish. I could tell that I had the mind of someone much older just by comparing myself to the other students in my class; I had the same childlike joy and silliness as them, but with much more depth of understanding and critical thinking. Very early on I could tell this was from reading. But no matter how much I recommended something, people waved me off, or if it was some insane classic (for example, The Lord of the Rings in late middle school), I would just get shocked and perturbed stares. Today I could rail against the public school system for hours on end; the problem is not the teachers or the lower level administration, it's not the cell phones or other "personal communication devices," and it's certainly not the fault of the poor children blamed for having bad behavior after having grown up in a prison-like setting and then immediately dumped for hopeless by the institution because of their socioeconomic status and lack of luck. What sickens me the most about the schools I've grown up in (and my district is regarded as one of the best and richest in the state, by the way) is how they've destroyed reading. Of course kids hate reading. In elementary school you're taught to read from mind numbingly boring passages with no real content, always written in such basic grammar it could be used to teach a toddler. By the time you read actual books in English class you're in middle school, and the books are burdened down with confusing assignments and ridiculously written tests and have all the life sucked from their pages. There is no complex and consequence-free discussion, no relying on your own interpretation of some symbolism (unless you want to want to get the question wrong), no reading just to read. Even I have been forced to hate books that I once loved because of how they were ruined for me by bad schooling. Again, it's not at all the fault of the teachers- some of the best and most passionate educators I've had have all been from English class. But they are forced to teach a strict curriculum geared around receiving barely passable results on an embarrasingly simple test. It's the system that's failed and made English objective instead of subjective, that have made children addicted to screens instead of pages and graduated illiterate adults. That's why kids these days refuse to pick up a book.

You can imagine how heartbreaking it is for me to have grown up in this knowing what I know about the reality of reading. I want the people around me to experience true darkness and real triumph, to explore complex themes of grief and oppression, to witness love beyond just secular interpretations- instead my first assigned summer reading was the first book in a contemporary series and was 25% dystopian, 75% romance (romance that got explicit in following books- not that the school would have taken responsibility for that, as they "only taught the first one"). If I was hoping for something more like Black Beauty or The Brother's Grimm, I was sorely disappointed. It took me until very late high school and AP classes, which are run by a program separate from the public school system, to have classes that treat literature the way it was always meant to be treated. But it's already too late for my fellow classmates who grew up without books. It's not too late for the next generation, however. That's why when I decided to make some sort of an impact, I knew exactly what impact I wanted to make.

I created Recommended Reads for people to find books of true quality. Currently the world of popular literature is run by BookTok and tends to be totally composed of romance, which isn't an issue, except that there are very few avenues for finding anything else. And there are so many millions of incredible books from every time period that have gone unnoticed and slipped through the cracks, but someone must have found them, maybe even as their own childhood favorite, and thought, "How is nobody else talking about this?" That's why I decided to create a platform where people can share the books they've discovered that have meant something to them, and then go find one that impacted someone else. It's open to children looking for an age-appropriate but acually interesting read and to adults who want to fit literature into their lives but aren't sure what to pick up. I don't care about the content in the books recommended, but my goal is to specialize in books that are more than just surface-level- the kind of books that carry love and meaning with them from the author to the reader. This is why I don't include any information about awards or bestsellers in my descriptions, as impressive and amazing as those things are, because everyone's childhood favorites deserve to be treated equally. Please, even if you're not sure, recommend anything and everything so that our bookshelf can grow. And please, since I can only get my own info from online descriptions and ratings that are often incomplete or vague, if there is anything about my descriptions, age ratings, genres, publication statements, or content warnings that I should add or edit, send it in on a review form with the information and book in question and I would love to update it to be as accurate to your favorite books as possible. My hope is to share my own love of reading with others in hope that it opens all of our eyes and makes the world a little bit bigger and a little bit better for all of us.