Harry Potter/Artemis fowl bit too old currently

I grew up devouring Enid Blyton books. I have read and reread Malory Towers, The Adventure & Secret series, The Magic Faraway Tree, The Famous Five & dozens of others, more times than I could count. I’d do pretty well on Mastermind, with Enid Blyton stories as a specialist subject. For the record, my favourites characters are The Old Saucepan Man from The Enchanted Wood, Jo The Gypsy Girl from The Famous Five, and Carlotta from St Clare’s. However, even glossing over the racism, sexism, snobbery & xenophobia (which we really shouldn’t) found in almost all Blyton books, I think most people forget quite how old these books are. Her first book was published just 3 years after the end of the 1st World War, Enid Blyton died in 1968. The first 5 year olds that read The Enchanted Wood are now 86 years old. I’ve said in my other posts about books, that I’m baffled by how limited a range of authors and titles people are likely to recommend. I’ve called them “nostalgia books”, but I wonder if it’s also just that, without having read any more recent equivalents, people really do believe that the books of their childhood (or, let’s be honest, their own parents’ & grandparents’ childhoods) are still the best that’s available. So, what I’d love, is for parents to give their time to a recent children’s book, or at least one written in the last 20 years or so. Not to read it to their children, but to read and see for themselves if they are able to recapture the joy they felt with Blyton, Dahl, Blume, Pratchett, Nesbit, Montgomery, Ingalls Wilder, Tolkien, Streatfeild, Lewis et al. Adults tend to look down on children’s books as lesser, when the truth is that the best of children’s literature is just wonderful stories, as worthy of our time as those that are written for adults. If a great film is about to be released, you don’t dismiss it because of it’s rating, you don’t say that once you’ve hit the age of 15 or 18, you’ve outgrown U, PG or 12 rated cinema. You truly are never too old for children’s books.  Rather than dismissing children’s books as beneath us, we should appreciate that what we read when young is what shapes us, and endures longest in our memories, and so is deserving of the greatest respect. Step outside your comfort zone, away from the current crop of celebrity authors, who though valuable, do not necessarily reflect the breadth and depth of what’s available. Our own children can only benefit from our realising how wonderful the books being written for them are, and by opening up their world, with books being written now, rather than only harking back to the distant past. Plus, you’ll be discovering a whole new world of amazing stories you didn’t know existed.