| From
the May/June 2006 issue of The Horn Book Magazine
Editorial
Leave Them Alone
 hildren’s
book people tend to get awfully prickly when nonspecialists venture
opinions on our field, whether it’s Madonna thinking she can
write a picture book or Harold Bloom taking down Harry Potter. So
my quills quivered when I saw that Naomi Wolf was writing about
YA fiction in the New York Times Book Review. Wolf devotes
her essay (published March 12, 2006) to the currently reigning subgenre
of YA books, bad-girl chicklit. Focusing on the Gossip Girl, Clique,
and A-List series, Wolf writes that they are “like Lord
of the Flies set in the local mall, without the moral revulsion.”
I’m not sure I agree about the lack of moral
revulsion — that the Gossip girls are shallow, mean-spirited,
and self-hating is a point made, with relish, page after page —
but I like the way Wolf demonstrates awareness of how these books
differ from the canon of YA books and the core experience the best
of them can evoke in readers: “It’s sad if the point
of reading for many girls now is no longer to take the adult world
apart but to squeeze into it all the more compliantly.”
One could argue that the outrage expressed in Wolf’s
article may be precisely why girls enjoy these books: Their
parents are horrified. So the books may be more subversive
than they look. But an unspoken question remains, the same one at
the heart of all such moral critiques of children’s books.
What do we do? If we sincerely believe a book is going to “be
bad” for children, what do we do?
This is not a question about censorship. In fact,
in a follow-up interview published on the Times website,
Wolf gets into something of a nervous lather explaining that she’s
not calling for censorship. (Liberals get anxious when progressivism
and free speech face off. Thank goodness.) But those who object
to depictions of x or themes of y would clearly like to see them
countered. Thus are born “teachable moments” and other
adult interventions determined to get between the reader and the
book.
When she says, “I would spend time asking
the girls themselves to reflect on and evaluate the heroines, the
message, the interactions — and give them some other kinds
of books and see where the discussion goes,” Wolf puts the
w in wet blanket. The nihilism expressed in Gossip
Girls is extensive, but jeez, Naomi, chill. Wolf does herself
— and teens — no favors by taking these books at face
value. The point of reading for pleasure is the power to choose
your own adventure, in both what you choose to read and how you
choose to read it. By yourself: we have to trust kids enough to
leave them alone with a book.
One of the prime pleasures of reading is the license
to ignore your parents. Neither books nor young readers should be
held hostage to adult debriefing. Readers reach their own conclusions.
Don’t you?
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