I tried to read The Hobbit to my daughter when she was 7. It was a failure.
She found it boring. I tried to liven it up with voices for the characters. But there's too much narration, too little dialog, too little action, and the language is too difficult to understand if you haven't done any english lit. (Forgive the lack of caps on "english" but my keyboard has no 'e's or 'w's any more. Too hard to chase down a cap 'e' to cut and paste.)