To put it nicely.
See, as you may know, I work at the local library here as an assistant to the teen librarian. Today I was working on picking out books for next month's book display. I'm doing books with red and/or green covers to kind of go with the Christmas season coming up. It seemed like it'd be super easy. I could just pick out a few books from the teen section that sounded interesting and had covers with red or green on them.
Well it wasn't that simple. I'd grab a book that looked interesting and look up some reviews on it, only to discover it was full of rather disgusting content. Since that wasn't going so well, I compiled a list of all the books in the teen section with red or green covers (that took a while, there were many more than I'd expected) then proceeded to go down the list looking up reviews. Book after book I discovered to have horrible content. This was the TEEN section. My younger brother is supposed to be old enough for this stuff, and I, four years older than him, was horrified just reading reviews of these books.
Look, this blog is directed mainly at 15-18 year olds, though I try to keep it rated PG for any younger friends or siblings of friends or just plain any younger kids who read some of it. I don't even feel I could uphold my obligation to appropriateness for my audience if I even alluded to what these books graphically describe. Wow. And guess what, only a year or so ago, the library didn't allow anyone under 18 to check out any movies that weren't rated G, seventeen year-olds couldn't get Tangled, but 12 year old kid could check out a book that makes me want to throw up just reading reviews of on the Common Sense Media site. Why is it that books are so different?
I think parents often think that if a kid is reading a book, any book, its a good thing. Because it's educational and all that. It isn't so quick and easy to read a book first before giving it to their kids, so they don't. Sure, they could search through reviews, but it's a lot easier to pre-watch a movie. So they don't check as much as they should. And maybe it doesn't occur to them. Books don't come with ratings like movies and video games do. I think they probably should. That would hurt the YA book industry though.
See, that kind of trashy book sells, doesn't it? Sad to say, but it does. And the YA book industry knows that. It's not some crazy accident that there's all these horrible things in books written for teens. It's not even a decision that the author made by themselves. Books go through agents, then are read and marked up all over by and editor. Then the author gets it back and makes changes. Then the editor reads through again and makes some more suggestions, then the author, then the editor, then the author... It might even be a number of different editors. They know this is going to be marketed to teens, and I bet they know it's wrong too.
Sure, make the excuses. They're just writing realistically. They're writing what the world is really like and what teens really do today. WELL GUESS WHAT GUYS??!! Where do these teens get their ideas to do these things? From your flippin dirty novels!
And that stuff is totally unnecessary. Unless you're writing a historical fiction novel about the holocaust. And even then you don't have to swim in the details. And if you're going to do that, you have every right to, but market it to adults, please.
You can write a romance novel without getting super physical, and you can write a great adventure without dumping blood and gore on us. Tanith Lee for example. She's a adult horror novelist. And that's fine. But when she wrote the Claidi Journals for young adults (one of my favorite series ever, I might add, I can't get over how amazing the books are), there was no extreme violence, the worst language was a few occurances of D*** and the physical romance reached its height at.. like five extremely brief kisses over four books. Let me repeat that. She's a adult horror novelist.
Write horrible graphic stuff to your heart's content if you want but please, market it to adults!
I hate how I can't just pick whatever sounds interesting from teen sections in libraries and book stores. I hate being afraid to read because of unnecessary bad content in books. I love reading, but I read a lot less because of that.
I think I'll be praying for the YA book publishing industry. Join me?
Count me in :-)
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