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by K. M. Hardie (Author)
Your son can read. He just won't.
He'll spend four hours on a screen and not five minutes on a book - and lately, watching it, you've started to wonder what all that scrolling is doing to him.
Here's someone he can't respawn his way past.
Alexander was twelve when he tamed a warhorse no grown man could ride. By thirty he had conquered most of the known world and never lost a single battle. He spent his mornings learning to fight and his afternoons being taught to think by Aristotle, the sharpest mind alive - then he took his father's army east, straight at the largest empire the world had ever seen. He won at the Granicus. He won at Issus. At Gaugamela he faced a Persian line that ran clear across the horizon, found the one gap in it, and drove through, and a two-hundred-year-old empire fell in a single afternoon. He didn't stop until he reached India.
This is the true story of Alexander the Great, told at the speed it deserves - and built for a boy who would rather be on a screen.
Barely one in seven kids now reads for fun. Military Stories for Boys is built for exactly that boy: the reluctant reader who can read perfectly well and simply won't. Every chapter opens in the middle of the action, and there's an illustration on nearly every page, so he never hits a wall of text. He can open it anywhere and something's already happening. He thinks he's only following the pictures. By the end he's finished a whole history book, and it never once felt like school.
In a game, he respawns. Alexander didn't. Every choice in this book was real, and it stuck - the one thing a screen full of restarting soldiers will never teach a boy.
And you can hand it to him without worrying. It's honest about what war cost and never gratuitous: real events, drawn with respect, never blood for its own sake.
Inside Book 2:
- An illustrated chapter book with an original picture on nearly every page, drawn for this book, never generic stock art
- Clear battle maps a boy can actually follow
- Short, fast chapters that drop him straight into the action
- True history - every name, date, and battle really happened
- Written so a strong nine-year-old can read it alone, and an easy fit by eleven or twelve
Don't take my word for it. Open Look Inside and read him the first two pages. Then watch how far he gets on his own.
Written by K.M. Hardie, who spent twenty-five years making complicated things simple to read, and now does it with the true stories that built the world. This is a book for reluctant readers - for boys who don't like reading, who can read perfectly well and would just rather be gaming. Hand him Alexander. The hardest part is getting him to open it. After that the story takes over, and when he's done he'll want the next one.
Military Stories for Boys - the Classical Commanders series.
