Background:
My son is not quite 13 years old. He is very intelligent, an avid reader, and reads way above his level, but is rather meek and not very "worldly" - that is, he has a very gentle nature and we have sheltered him from as much of the ugliness of the world as we could.
Sometimes I am surprised by his seeming contradictions, for example, he will gladly spend hours at the computer ruthlessly killing thousands of enemies and aliens, yet he refuses to kill a fly in the house with a rubber band gun (this used to be his job, I made him the rubber band gun several years ago and he is very good with it) because he says that he does not want to kill a living thing.
Admirable sentiments (except concerning insects in the house), but this gives you an idea of his thinking.
Request:
I need some good summer reading material, but I want it to be clean of sex and gratuitous ugliness as much as possible. Note the use of the word "ugliness" and not "violence" since they are not necessarily the same and some violence is much uglier than other.
He has devoured many major popular things like Harry Potter and Hunger Games, and when he was a couple of years younger his all-time favorites were Laurence Yep's Dragon books and TA Barron's Young Merlin series. He has enjoyed Scott Westerfeld's Leviathan series (refused Uglies/Pretties because his sister read it first), I can't remember them all off the top of my head, I may edit this later as they come to me.
Strangely, even though he is almost obsessed with dragons, he has started some things, Eragon and Wizard of Earthsea come to mind, that have not held his interest and he set them aside.
So, how about tossing some ideas out there for me? He is past "kiddie" stuff now, but it is hard to find "headier" works that are still clean.
I don't want him sitting in from of the computer all summer, even though he is using a very handsome bolt-modded black label Model M with red-dyed WASD and Escape keys!
