A lack of male protagonists is making it harder to get young boys into books

Re:A lack of male protagonists is making it harder to get yo... by bryanlarsen on Sunday November 08, 2026 @09:42AM (#50413765)

Seems surprising. The first books my daughter really got into all had male protagonists: Harry Potter, Percy Jackson, The Adventurer's Guild.

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Re:A lack of male protagonists is making it harder to get yo... by ajay-b on Sunday November 08, 2026 @12:34PM (#50415291)

Conversely, even as a male, mine was Nancy Drew. I could not enjoy Hardy Boys for some reason

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Re:A lack of male protagonists is making it harder to get yo... by Henchman21 on Sunday November 08, 2026 @03:29PM (#50416837)

Having read all the Hardy Boys as a child, because I was told I had to read something, I can definitely agree they are not particularly enjoyable.

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Re:A lack of male protagonists is making it harder to get yo... by defrost on Sunday November 08, 2026 @05:35PM (#50418174)

As a younger reader I read anything that passed me by, later I on I started avoiding various types of template books; Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew were good examples of ghostwritten syndicated churn.

I also chewed through a number of an earlier Stratemeyer Syndicate production - the early 1900s boy genius space rockets, satellites, and monorails across Africa wonder of Tom Swift and ...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Tom_Swift_books

At least they didn't suffer from Alfred Hitchcock shoehorning his way into every book: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Three_Investigators

All that US origin "children's literature" pushed me into Canadian, UK, and European reading.

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