4 Books Your Teenage Daughter Should Read This Summer
- Jaime Jo Wright Crosswalk.com Contributing Writer
- Updated May 23, 2024
Heading into summer and book reading may not be on every teenage girl’s radar. But it’s always smart to have a list ready just in case there’s a moment when they want to lay out in the sun with a paperback or curl up with their Kindle. So what books are out there right now that are appropriate for your teenage daughter and reinforce their faith?
Quite a few!
Many parents struggle to find quality Christian material that is also interesting to teenagers. Whether it’s non-fiction or fiction, the Christian book industry has you covered! Here is a fun list to get you started:
Non-Fiction
1. Praying for Your Future Husband & the newly released, Before You Meet Your Future Husband - by Robin Jones Gunn and Tricia Goyer – Multnomah Publishing
These books are fabulous and foundational to help your teenager begin to view marriage and their future spouse through the eyes of Christ. With romance being front and center for many girls, now is the time to prepare their hearts for the man who will one day become their husband if they get married. Robin Jones Gunn and Tricia Goyer bring two books written in a way that teenagers and young women will not only relate to but enjoy. And they introduce precepts critical for a healthy view of romance and marriage as it relates to their relationship with God.
Written with discussion questions and journaling options, these books are interactive and engaging too!
About Before You Meet Your Future Husband
Bestselling author Robin Jones Gunn teams up with author and teen advocate Tricia Goyer on a devotional for young single women to help them establish God-honoring thinking and beliefs that will lay a firm foundation for their future marriage.
Movies, television, and novels feature glamorous portrayals of dating and marriage, giving us unrealistic expectations of what true love looks like. A beautiful counterpoint to those dreamy fantasies, Before You Meet Your Future Husband focuses on three areas you, as a young woman, need to address in preparing for marriage:
• your heart—nurturing a place where healthy love can grow
• your head—realigning your thoughts with biblical truth
• your hands—learning to make the most of your God-given potential
This uplifting, interactive devotional helps you approach dating from a place of peace and strength, whether you’re in a relationship now or hope to be married one day. With a focus on your own transformation, Before You Meet Your Future Husband offers biblical guidance, real-life stories, thought-provoking questions, and intentional prayers to help you prepare now for the future God has in store for you.
Discover the freedom and contentment of preparing for a God-honoring, life-giving relationship.
2. The Case for Faith – Student Edition, by Lee Strobel / Jane Vogel, Zondervan
Your teenage daughter is growing up in a world that will not take her Christianity at face value. We no longer live in a society where church-going and Bible-believing are the norm. Instead, your daughter is coming into her faith in a culture that challenges its authenticity, logic, reasoning, and sanity.
The Case for Faith is a book that has long been around but has recently been revised for students. It provides infographics and charts for visual learners, can be used as a study or a general read, and will help answer the arguments your teens and young adults will face and may even be asking themselves!
Why is there suffering? Doesn’t science disprove miracles? What about hell—and the millions who’ve never heard of Jesus? Is heaven for real? Is God unjust? Lee Strobel decided to use his award-winning journalistic skills to investigate the idea of faith and prove that placing our trust in things we cannot see is a solid bet. This updated The Case for Faith Student Edition adapts Strobel’s bestselling The Case for Faith to present hard-hitting findings and interviews with believers and skeptics alike in an easy-to-follow manner so you can decide about Christian faith for yourself.
The Case for Faith Student Edition:
It is written for readers ages twelve and older
Presents the arguments for and against having faith that teens and young adults often ask and encounter so they can see the real evidence and facts
Fiction
3. The Curious Realities Book 1: The Wonderland Trials, by Sara Ella – Enclave Publishing
Does your daughter love traveling to fantastical places in fiction? She will be thrilled to travel with Alice Liddell as she’s invited to play in this year’s Wonderland Trials. With intrigue, wit, and a scrappy and strong female lead that is relatable to teenage girls, your daughter will dive into a take on Alice in Wonderland that will leave her noticing the nuances but loving the new! You may even want to read it along with her—if she’ll let you—it’s just that good!
Solve the clues. Face your fears. Survive the Trials. All Alice Liddell wants is to escape her Normal life in Oxford and find the parents who abandoned her ten years ago. But she gets more than she bargained for when her older sister Charlotte is arrested for having the infamous Wonder Gene—the key to unlocking the curious Wonderland Reality.
Soon, Alice receives a rather cryptic invitation to play for Team Heart in this year’s annual—and often deadly—Wonderland Trials. Now she has less than twenty-four hours to find her way into Wonderland where nothing is impossible - or what it seems.
The stakes are raised when she discovers players go missing during the Trials each year. Will she and her team solve the clues and find the missing players? Or will betrayal and distrust win, leaving Alice alone in her own world? Follow the White Rabbit into this topsy-turvy fantasy where players become prey, a sip of the wrong tea might as well be poison, and a queen’s ways do not always lead one where they ought to go.
4. Authentically Izzy, by Pepper Basham – Thomas Nelson
Let’s face it! Many teenage girls want to enter into the fictional world of romance, but so much of it is not the type of romance we want them to read. Enter Authentically, Izzy! While it’s an adult novel, it’s one that teenagers will enjoy if they’re of the romantic inclination. Clean, fun, witty, and charming, this romance is a fabulous introduction to Christian romance, and it’s written in an epistolary fashion that many teenagers will be enthralled with. Reading emails, texts, and the like, your daughter will go along with Izzy into the world of online dating—all of its problems.
Dear Reader, My name is Isabelle Louisa Edgewood—Izzy, for short. I live by blue-tinted mountains, where I find contentment in fresh air and books. Oh, and coffee and tea, of course. And occasionally in being accosted by the love of my family. (You’ll understand my verb choice in the phrase later.) I dream of opening my own bookstore, but my life, particularly my romantic history, has not been the stuff of fairy tales. This is probably why my pregnant, misled, matchmaking cousin—who is more like my sister—signed me up for an online dating community.
The trouble is, it worked. I’ve met my book-quoting Mr. Right, and our correspondence has been almost too good to be true. But Brodie lives across an ocean. And just the other day, a perfectly nice author and professor named Eli came into the library where I work and asked me out for a coffee. I feel like a rom-com movie with a foreboding disaster nipping at my heels.
But I’ve played it safe for a long time. Maybe it’s time for me to be as brave as my favorite literary heroines. Maybe it’s time to take the adventures from the page to real life. Wish me luck.
Authentically,
Izzy
So there you have it! If your daughter can get through some books this summer, this is a fabulous list to work from! And don’t be dismayed! If she’s an avid reader, there’s a lot more where these came from!
Jaime Jo Wright is an ECPA and Publisher’s Weekly bestselling author. Her novel “The House on Foster Hill” won the prestigious Christy Award and she continues to publish Gothic thrillers for the inspirational market. Jaime Jo resides in the woods of Wisconsin, lives in dreamland, exists in reality, and invites you to join her adventures at jaimewrightbooks.com and at her podcast madlitmusings.com where she discusses the deeper issues of story and faith with fellow authors.
