As a homeschooling mother of six children, including four boys, our home library of children’s books is extensive. My older children are reading chapter books, and they are consuming them faster than I can research them and obtain them from the library and used booksellers. For my oldest daughter, it’s not particularly difficult to procure her next read — the protagonists in most chapter books written for her age are girls with whom she can identify. After having literally co-written the book on radical indoctrination of childhood last year with Karol Markowicz, Stolen Youth, my radar is always up for inappropriate content written for children in the last 15 years. But perhaps a bigger problem than indoctrination for me in choosing my sons’ next reads is this: for chapter book-reading boys, there is next to no content written for their age range.

After writing my book, I started an Instagram page called RightBooks4Kids along with another homeschooling mother, Rachel Reeves. We didn’t want to be just warning parents about the bad books — we wanted to help parents discern and identify the good ones. We open our book-finding suggestions up to online requests: What do parents want our help with as they choose their child’s next read? The question we receive most frequently by a large margin is a variation of “What book written in the last few decades could my chapter book-loving son read next?”