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Should You Rent Your Child a Book Series, or Mix It Up With Standalones?

Book Selection·October 22, 2026·4 min read·3–5 yrs6–8 yrs9–12 yrs

Your child finished book one of a series on day three and has asked about book two every day since — and the next box isn't due for another three weeks. It's tempting to just keep feeding the series and call it a win. It's also tempting to worry that letting them stay in one world means they're missing out on everything else that's out there, or that a series is somehow the easier, lesser version of reading.

The core finding: series books genuinely pull kids in, more than the books adults recommend

Adrienne Greenlee, Dianne Monson, and Barbara Taylor (1996), writing in The Reading Teacher, asked 32 eleven- and twelve-year-olds about one series book and one adult-recommended, non-series book they'd each read. About 72% of the children showed real personal engagement and involvement with the series book, compared with 60% for the recommended one. By the study's own measure of how absorbed a reader actually was, the series book was, for most of these kids, the more gripping read.

The bigger picture: loving a series doesn't seem to cost them anything else

Here's the part that should ease the worry: in the same study, 56% of the children said they actually liked the recommended, non-series book better overall, and the same share thought their friends would too — even while reporting more emotional engagement with the series title in the moment. Those two things sat comfortably side by side. A child fully absorbed in book four of a series wasn't, in this evidence, losing their taste for a different kind of book; they may just be reading the series with more hunger while staying just as open to being handed something else next.

Where it's genuinely uncertain

This is one small study — 32 children, one country, one narrow age band, and nearly thirty years old now. It doesn't tell us much about how this plays out for a five-year-old versus a ten-year-old, or in an Indian household specifically. Later commentary on this research has also pointed to real, specific downsides in some series: a formulaic structure, characters re-introduced the same way in every book, and in some older series, a narrow, mostly-homogenous cast. None of that means every series is automatically fine — it means the blanket worry that series reading itself is a lesser form of reading doesn't hold up well.

What this means for your next box

If your child is hooked on a series, let this cycle lean into it. Three books of one series finished is still three more books read than if they'd stalled on something unfamiliar.
Mix one sure-thing series pick with one standalone your child has a say in choosing — the co-choosing seems to matter more than whether the book is part of a series or not.
If your rental box lets you request titles, ask whether the next book in a series your child is mid-way through can be prioritised, so they're not left hanging on a cliffhanger for a month.
Watch your child's own interest more than the momentum of the series. Skipped pages or a request for "something else" is a better signal to stop than simply having more books left in the set.

If you're choosing from RentToRead's own catalogue, the Amma Tell Me About… series — covering Krishna, Hanuman, Durga Puja, Holi, and the Ramayana — is a good example of exactly this kind of series: short, standalone-enough stories that still build the same momentum a child gets from going book to book.

Sources

Greenlee, A. A., Monson, D. L., & Taylor, B. M. (1996). The lure of series books: Does it affect appreciation for recommended literature? The Reading Teacher, 50(3), 216–225.