Q: Please recommend some books to get my 16-year-old daughter off social media and Love Island and into reading again.
A 47-year-old mother, London
A: Bidisha, writer, broadcaster and film-maker/performer, writes:
OK, first the addictive gateway drugs. No teenage brain is complete without a thorough immersion in Virginia Andrews’s jaw-droppingly perverse Flowers in the Attic (abused kids locked in an attic… weird stuff happens), Lois Duncan’s Down a Dark Hall (maladjusted girls sent to a special school… weird stuff happens) and, of course, Carrie by Stephen King (bullied girl with a Bible-beating mum can’t take it any more… weird stuff happens).
That should prep the territory. Next, some fabulous and inspiring women from the real world. Comedian Mindy Kaling’s witty Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me?, actor Zawe Ashton’s bold memoir Character Breakdown, Mona Eltahawy’s defiant Headscarves and Hymens, Chinese novelist and film-maker Xiaolu Guo’s story of emigration Once Upon a Time in the East, the great Maya Angelou’s I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, North Korean defector Hyeonseo Lee’s nail-biting story of escape, The Girl With Seven Names, and Michelle Obama’s candid personal and political memoir Becoming are essential reads. But nothing tops fashion designer Diane von Furstenberg’s autobiography of yachts, diamonds and frockery, The Woman I Wanted to Be.
In fiction, I would springboard off a childhood grounding in fairytales to suggest Angela Carter’s classic story collection The Bloody Chamber and perhaps the surrealist painter Leonora Carrington’s strange and fun The Hearing Trumpet. In cutting-edge contemporary fiction, I’m drawn to the youthful friendships in Sharlene Teo’s Ponti, the romantic heroine in Candice Carty-Williams’s bestselling Queenie and the haunted trophy wife in Radhika Jha’s My Beautiful Shadow.
If your daughter likes bonnets, she can choose from two sexist and repressive societies: Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice (from the early 19th century) or Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale (about the future) – and its forthcoming sequel, The Testaments. Austen and Atwood’s worlds, though fictional, are painfully recognisable today.
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