In my experience, some of the best books written for young men are " The Hardy Boys" series by Franklin W. Dixon. These are the very first chapter books that I read aloud to my older boys years ago.They loved them and read them on their own after thoroughly enjoying the many that we read aloud together.
Remembering how close Jeff and Greg and I felt while sharing these books made me read them aloud to Sam and John. Like their brothers, both of them fell in love with these adventure stories and have been reading them continuously all year.
The wild and dangerous scrapes that Frank and Joe Hardy get into and get back out of has inspired the boys' new game of "Sleuthing". The boys dress up in army vests and go into the neighborhood with flashlights and jackknives to look for clues.When I was a kid, we called this " Peeping Tom". This is Sam's Crime Lab, located in his closet where he can investigate evidence that they discover while sleuthing.
What the boys get the biggest kick out of is how much "freedom" the Hardy Boys, who are upperclassmen in high school, have! They each have a motorcycle, a car to share, and a motorboat ready to go at all times.They love their Mom whose main function is to encourage them to eat the delicious meals she is always cooking! Frank and Joe are often tied up, sometimes to the railroad tracks, beaten and kicked and are on the go all day and night helping their dad, Fenton Hardy, to solve mysteries. Each Hardy Boys book is twenty chapters worth of fantastic vocabulary and arm-chair gripping suspense! These young detectives and their excellent chums, Chet, Bif and Tony, get into very dangerous situations and are always real gentlemen, especially with their occasional dates, Callie Shaw and Iola Morton.
They are wonderful heroes and I highly recommend these books to every middle-school aged boy. John read three of them this week!
