PJW: It’s tough to find a book for pre-teens and teens without graphic sex and violence. The “Young Adult” section, which is marketed to kids from nine to seventeen, is full of stuff most parents would not want their children reading about. Because of it, sites like Common Sense Media, where you can see what kind of content is in the books before you let your kid read them, are very popular with parents.
Parents and kids rate the books according to how much violence, sex, drug use, mature themes, and the like are in them. Librarians and the American Library Association are staunchly opposed to anyone categorizing books by content and liken it to censorship. They’re out of their minds.
On one hand, they tell parents, “It’s up to you to direct your child’s reading,” but they offer no help in actually doing that by their refusal to mark books that contain adult content. And now that some websites are answering parents’ calls for innocent plotlines by offering “Clean Teen” selections, SJW authors, who think every child should have the sexual knowledge of Caligula, have their panties in a twist about it. more here
Scum.
Damn. In my world, the age of a young adult category would no younger than maybe 14. Nine? No.
Doesn’t sound at all like an SJW.
Clean reading for teens and young adults was banned long ago with the non reading of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn . I just read a short story by Ray Bradbury called The Exiles this morning, another of his great stories about banning books, this time in the year 2020 when all the authors particularly of horror stories, ghost stories like Edgar Allen Poe. Ambrose Bierce, Nathaniel Hawthorne and even Charles Dickens etc. have been banned forever because they wrote books that society didn’t like. I read Bradbury, Robert A Heinlein, Edgar Rice Burroughs, Clifford D Simak etc. for the guilty pleasure of reading a wild imaginative good story. Which is what kids should be allowed to do, but we can’t have that because it make a kid a rebel, a reader who can think for him or herself so they pervert and pollute everything to the lowest common denominator to keep kids stupid and politically and culturally indoctrinated. Hell they even banned Alice In Wonderland because it’s too close to the truth about going down the rabbit hole into unreality.
I’m happy that parents want clean teen book options for their kids. I’ve been working for a while on a “side project” that is wholesome and fun. One comment we got back from an editor was that it wasn’t exciting enough and needed “a kidnapping or death” to hold the readers interest. It’s a kids chapter book and the reader is 7-10 years old! Seriously?!?
Zonga recommended reading: Clean and interesting mysteries for young girls, early teens
Nancy Drew (1930 – ’79 (poor quality stories and writing after ’79) and Cherry Ames (1943 – 68).
When I was asked for a video choice for younger kids wanting a horror film (minus the blood and gore that was prevalent in most movies) I suggested Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds or others of a similar vein.
All new for the kids and they loved it.
Skip the new crap and return to the classics.
I’m more in favor of a “clean tooth” section.
Rick Reardon (children of Mt Olympus gods series) and Brandon Mull (Fable Haven and Dragon Watch series among others) are two that I have read and highly recommend.
Roman V,
“Young Frankenstein” .
GEOF
Forgot all about Simark! Was a SF reader 68 – 1 year ago. Read at least half of Rod’s stuff years before it was on TV. In mags that were $0.05 a month! I am old!
For those under 60 Rod ( a man with no brains; he jumped out a aeroplanes! Killed a few Marxists in ’44) had a poplar TV show in the late 50’s early 60’s TWILIGHT AINE
I personally didn’t read any of the smutty teen stuff in my teens, I did get into some popular books (like the hunger games or maze runner) but those are a little bit violent at worst.
I can’t believe I’m saying this (because this is such a 2012 thing to say) but Twilight DID popularize sex in YA books. And it was written as a literal sex fantasy/escape by the author, she admitted it herself.
So why should parents have to expose their kids to the personal sexual fantasies of 40 year old women? Why should the kids have to for that matter? Plenty don’t want to read that tripe I assure you.
(I certainly didn’t when I was growing up)
Why do kids have to read books and stories by today’s writers? Most are junk.
Why not put classics in their hands? Jules Verne, Daniel Defoe, Robert Louis Stevenson, Thomas Hardy, Alcott,Daphne duMaurier, the Tarzan books…
Other suggestions, anyone?
Hemingway
I’d probably want to shoot myself in the head like Hemingway did if I willingly read Hemingway ever again. He was an overrated womanizing, drunk, God hating buffoon.