You don’t need to be a Bible-thumping traditionalist to be alarmed at what publishers are pushing into the Young Adult fiction market for teenagers and older pre-teens. There are themes and content choices that many parents would be unwilling to allow younger readers to encounter, but the criticisms are falling on deaf ears, as Megan Fox shows:
“New Spin on YA” by Salem (MA) Public Library is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0
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.
“If they’re named ‘Clean Teen’ novels what are the rest called? ‘Unwashed Teen’ ‘Trash Teen’ ‘Didn’t shower after soccer practice Teen’ ‘Say three Hail Mary’s in confessional Teen?'” said Zorri Cordova, a supposed author.
The far-left weirdos are never satisfied to corrupt their own children, they want your kids too. The American Library Association loves to take potshots at Common Sense Media. “These days, Common Sense Media’s initiatives contain a less than subtle paternalism based on the conviction that its values should control children’s learning experiences,” wrote Joyce Johnston on the ALA’s Intellectual Freedom Blog. They have no problem, however, controlling children’s learning experiences with their far-left values. For a laughable example, check out ALA’s LGBT initiatives.
Publisher’s Weekly wrote about this topic.
Kendra Levin at Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers observes that “the meaning of ‘clean teen’ can depend on the context, but within publishing houses, I think it’s most often used to describe a buffer zone between middle grade and mature YA — books specifically geared toward the younger end of the teen spectrum. You could also call this young teen and 12-and-up YA, as opposed to 14 and up.
This suggests that 14-year-olds are ready for the Roman orgies and coke parties that are depicted in the majority of YA fiction these days (and yes, I’ve read them). I don’t know what planet these people are living on, but it’s starting to get to me. What is wrong with Little House on the Prairie? Oh yeah, Laura Ingalls Wilder has been branded a racist.
