Read The Hobbit free in the Little Reads app.
J. R. R. Tolkien's The Hobbit is a proper long adventure for 11 year olds about somebody who does not want one at all.
Bilbo Baggins lives in a hole in the ground. Not a horrible one. A hobbit-hole, which as the book explains straight away means comfort.
Round green door. Brass knob in the exact middle. Pantries, plural.
The Bagginses are respectable. You can tell exactly what one will say about anything without going to the bother of asking. They do not have adventures.
Then a wizard turns up at the door and will not go away.
Their first conversation is about the words "good morning" and it goes on for an entire page. Bilbo uses it to mean five different things. Gandalf points this out. Bilbo panics and invites him to tea just to get rid of him.
The next day thirteen dwarves arrive instead. They hang their hoods on his pegs, eat his seed-cakes, call for ale and porter and coffee and more cakes, and send him running to the pantry while he tries to look like a man who was expecting this.
Then the lamps go out and somebody starts playing a harp, and the whole book changes gear. The dwarves sing about a mountain full of gold and the dragon who took it. Bilbo sits in the dark wanting to see mountains and wear a sword instead of a walking stick.
It lasts about a minute. Thorin starts explaining that some of them may never return, and Bilbo shrieks like a kettle and falls over on the hearth rug.
What actually gets him out of the door is overhearing a dwarf say he looks more like a grocer than a burglar.
The reading experience is the narrator. He talks straight to you, tells you things in the wrong order, drops in a whole daft story about how golf was invented and then wanders back. He also tells you at the start that you will have to wait and see how Bilbo gets on.
Be honest with yourself about the pace. Nothing much happens in the first chapter except a very long tea party, thirteen names arrive in a heap, and the sentences are old-fashioned and take their time. This is a book to start together, out loud, rather than to hand over and hope.
Stick with it and your reader will notice the humour and the danger are doing the same job. The company writes to Bilbo offering him one fourteenth of the profits, all travelling expenses, and funeral expenses if it comes to that. The joke and the warning are the same sentence.
If they take to the idea of walking out on a perfectly nice life, Dealing with Dragons is in the library too. Cimorene is a princess who has been told that fencing, magic, Latin and cooking are all improper, so she goes off to find a dragon and asks for a job.
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