Ivanhoe
Acceptable with guidance. Age: 14+. A Catholic review of this book for parents.
Our review
Scott gives teenagers chivalry worth admiring: a knight who rides wounded to defend an innocent woman, and Rebecca, who would rather die than surrender her purity. The reservation is real. Nearly every churchman is worldly, drunk or cruel, the narrator calls penance superstition, and Isaac the Jew is partly a miser caricature. Scott wrote as a Protestant looking back at Catholic England.
For parents
Read aloud from 12, independent reading from 14. Plugged In says 16. Use the unabridged text. Ask why Rebecca is the most faithful person in the story. Then ask whether bad priests prove the Church false, and read a saint's life from the same century alongside it.