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

The article is much more balanced than comments here make it out to be. Sure, the title got it on the front page, but the article considers different possibilities. For example, it addresses the issue of older books having plenty of male characters by arguing that kids have a harder time getting into older books due to the pacing / lack of lots of action. Watching today’s popular anime, I believe it. Whether you believe it or not, there’s more depth to this article than it sounds like from the comments.

My problem with books recommended by schools and parents are that they are the insipid kind of books. Yes I'm a fan of Jane Austen's works but I needed to read some action fantasy books. Boys love super hero oriented themes who are standing between the innocent ppl and the villain. And also video game mechanics in their stories. We need to introduce the kids to those books. Royal Road, webnovel have lots of such stories. Maybe parents and the school authorities are not looking there. I just read Phil Tucker's "Dawn of the Void vol 1" and it is so nice for any boy to read.

What the English faculty in colleges and schools need is to work with the authors of the "Levelling genre" or "Isekai genre" and modify those books with the reading abilities of those boys according to their grades while keeping the credits with the original authors.

My kids read Harry Potter and Percy Jackson growing up in the US (both with male protagonists), and they were huge fans of the LOTR movie series (with its nine members of the fellowship of the ring, all male).

It's really hard for me to believe American kids suddenly can't get enough books with male protagonists. If that's the case, the fault must lie with whoever's choosing books for those kids.

I would recommend Magician: Apprentice and the sequel. It's basically a group of 12-year-old boys growing up in a fantasy world - one becomes a magician, one a fighter, and there are others...

https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/13812.Magician

I think this is pandering to quietly misogynist people; books don't disappear after they're written. All of the hundreds of books with a male protagonist that I read as a kid are still around, so if the industry has over-corrected it doesn't meaningfully affect anyone.

I can't imagine how hard it is to try to make it as an author in 2026. Between the sheer number of people writing, the suspicions of AI use, trying to be discovered, it must be completely demoralizing.

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

Maybe it was just because I was a precocious reader at 8-12, but at that age almost none of the "age-appropriate" books in my school library actually interested me. You start to think about difficult "adult" subjects like relationships, mortality, conflict etc, yet no material available to you really addresses these ideas in a way that doesn't feel like they're just completely coddling you from reality. I had to go to the public library to find actual novels I felt were at my maturity level. You had 8 year olds using racial slurs against each other playing call of duty and you're worried they're scarred for life reading "fuck" in a novel? Come on children aren't idiots, expect more from them.

    > Out of curiosity, she compiled a database of 2026 releases and combed through them, analyzing their protagonists. Umesi found[1] a surprising disparity: Girl protagonists outnumbered boys by a ratio of 2 to 1. Some categories, such as realistic fiction and mystery, were especially lopsided, she told me, with ratios of more than 3 to 1. “Girls are taking over!” she said, with a laugh.

    > Umesi’s survey offers just one snapshot of the publishing landscape. But others I spoke with in the children’s-book business shared the perception that today’s protagonists are predominantly female. The dearth of male protagonists, some told me, has made it harder to get boys in this age bracket interested in reading.

    > The idea that boys might prefer stories about boys sounds awkwardly retrograde, even to the boys themselves. Kids rarely state such preferences outright, Melissa LaSalle, the children’s-book buyer at Old Town Books, in Alexandria, Virginia, told me. Their parents sometimes will, albeit “in a slightly embarrassed way.” Of course, individuals might not connect to a book for any number of reasons: sense of humor, narrative stakes, cover art. “But the unifying theme that I hear resoundingly from parents of boy readers,” LaSalle said, “is, at the end of the day, there are not enough boy protagonists.”

[1]:https://readingmiddlegrade.substack.com/p/we-need-more-boy-b...

I was at my typical bookstore lately and I walked right out again. All the recommendations by staff and bestsellers all anchored around "I'm a woman and I see the world like so and so". I wanted inspiration on life in general (think The Alchemist or whatever). Not how it is to be a woman. Not hating, but I'm a dude in my mid thirties and an avid reader. The whole bookstore was remade to cater to young women, tiktok viewers (has selfie walls and shit), and table top games. I get that there's market pressure, but it was already hard to buy books already (like english books taking 3 weeks to be ordered and such). I don't want to order on amazon ...

Really a pity. Another big store opened 100m from them. Hope they get their ass whooped.

Marvel is still putting out plenty of them.

Dad of a 7 year old boy here: no.

Oodles of graphic novels these days, plus all the formulaic initial books like Magic Treehouse and Box Car Children, and then you blow their minds by slipping them The Great Brain, The Mad Scientists’ Club, Tom Sawyer, The Dark is Rising…

It is more or less inevitable that successful representation pushes will overcorrect and you get a situation like this. It doesn’t have to be badly intentioned, and it’ll work itself out as the market corrects itself. But my boys have plenty of books to read with male protagonists if they want them. Percy Jackson alone has carried one of my kids through a long stretch of recreational reading. There is, you know, centuries of literature for children available during which male protagonists were over represented.

We just spent the last several years hearing how representation matters, and when the numbers flip sufficiently that a new group is now under represented they get told "that's too bad".

When you look at where money is spent and by whom, keep it in mind as you shift the demographics of who's watching / reading. The money moves with the groups interest, and it doesn't necessarily get filled by the new demographic.

This sounds like a pretty dumb explanation due to the obvious fact that you're not forced to only read books which came out in the current year...

Somehow, one single year of female protagonist majority is more powerful than 3000 years of male protagonist majority.

> The idea that boys might prefer stories about boys sounds awkwardly retrograde

Jeez, how far from common sense are some people nowadays.

Did someone steal all the old books? This is absurd on its face.

Sounds like the Critical Drinkers “modern audiences”.

Maybe the publishers could start a campaign to recruit more male writers, and put greater effort around promoting and publishing their books. Then we could take those books and market them to boys and say look, you can be a writer too.

> The idea that boys might prefer stories about boys sounds awkwardly retrograde, even to the boys themselves. Kids rarely state such preferences outright, Melissa LaSalle, the children’s-book buyer at Old Town Books, in Alexandria, Virginia, told me. Their parents sometimes will, albeit “in a slightly embarrassed way.” Of course, individuals might not connect to a book for any number of reasons: sense of humor, narrative stakes, cover art. “But the unifying theme that I hear resoundingly from parents of boy readers,” LaSalle said, “is, at the end of the day, there are not enough boy protagonists.”

Meanwhile, it used to be a standard talking point that girls need more female protagonists to identify with, same with other protected classes.

It would be nice if the arguments were applied consistently.

Now lets see the atlantic write endless articles advocating for greater representation of women, racial minorities, lgbt people, and disabled people in media where they are underrepresented.

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