Age Appropriate? What We Do--and Don't--Tell Kids to Read

I'm sure everyone and his mother has opinions about the age appropriateness of certain books, and that the large community of YA readers, writers, reviewers, and their mothers have more opinions than most. Until recently, I was pretty sure I didn't have opinions like that. My parents never really monitored my reading when I was growing up, though we always did talk about it, and I loved nothing more than doing just that. I read a lot, even as a kid, devouring pretty much all the fiction I could get my hands on -- most of it found while browsing my school or public library, or the local bookstore.

As a member of the Harry Potter generation -- and as someone whose love of fantasy was rekindled by those books -- I grew up at the forefront of some of the biggest debates about age suitability and parents controlling what their kids read, and all of it struck me as incredibly strange. I distinctly remember being very puzzled as to why one of my friends, to whom I was incredibly grateful for introducing me to the Chronicles of Narnia, wasn't allowed to read Harry Potter. (Him: They have witches and wizards! Me: So does C. S. Lewis. And the White Witch is scarier than Voldemort. Him: But the Chronicles of Narnia are Christian books! Me: Have you noticed they always celebrate Christmas at Hogwarts?) Aside from the fact that telling the average kid not to do something is the best way to ensure he does just that (something J. K. Rowling thoroughly understands -- look at what happens in Order of the Phoenix when Umbridge tries to ban the Quibbler), telling kids not to read things just never made sense to me.

But now that I am slightly older, with two younger cousins coming to me for reading recommendations, I'm realizing that there's another side to parental control of reading -- not just what grown-ups forbid, but what they never recommend.

Over the past week, I've read two young adult novels -- Jane Yolen's Dragon's Blood, first published in 1982, and Holly Black's White Cat, first published in 2010 -- and although they're very different novels, they got me thinking again about the question of content and age suitability.

Dragon's Blood takes place on a desert planet where one of the main businesses (and pastimes) is training dragons to fight each other. The planet's economy depends upon a system of indentured servitude, with people trying to earn enough coins to fill their bags and buy free of their debts. The story follows fifteen-year-old Jakkin as he attempts to do just this by stealing a dragon egg and raising the hatchling to become a fighter. By all rights I should recommend this book to my cousin -- what teenage boy, or girl for that matter, doesn't like reading about dragons? -- but I'm not sure I will. While male indentured servants tend to fill their bags by working in dragon hatcheries, as Jakkin does, most of the (male) characters in the novel seem to think that the only way for female indentured servants to do the same is to work at brothels -- which are so connected to these indebted women that they are known as "baggeries," where women work to fill their bags. On the one hand, it's probably realistic that a kid who works at a middle-of-nowhere dragon hatchery wouldn't have encountered or heard stories of other jobs for indentured women. And on the world that Yolen has set up, it might be that there aren't many. But I'm not exactly sure this is the kind of book I want my young male cousin to be reading.

White Cat, aside from possessing a teenaged male protagonist, is a very different story. Seventeen-year-old Cassel lives in a world remarkably like this one, except for the fact that he comes from a family of curse workers, whose (technically illegal) powers let them do everything from changing people's luck to manipulating emotions to breaking bones, all with the touch of an ungloved hand. Cassel's the only one in the family who isn't a "worker," but it doesn't keep him from getting all tied up in his elder brothers' mafia connections or having to deal with the fact that his mom's in jail for using her abilities. The result is that he feels way older than the average seventeen-year-old, and in some ways the book seems "older," too -- to the point that some reviewers have complained that it is far too violent to be a young adult read. In White Cat, people beat people up, lie and cheat and steal, break into houses, and take orders from organized crime syndicates without any of this seeming particularly out-of-the-ordinary. At moments it is unabashedly violent. And yet my gut response is that I'd be more likely to recommend it to my cousin than Dragon's Blood, and not just because it's a better novel. For some reason, I don't feel the need to shelter him from violence the way I feel like I should be directing him away from even oblique (but pervasive) references to sex slavery.

Thinking further about this comparison, it's not like White Cat contains glowing female role models. In fact, I don't think I particularly like any of the female characters, at least not yet, largely because the ones who could possibly be likable feel underdeveloped in comparison to Cassel and his brothers (though I haven't read the sequel yet, and Red Glove could very well change this). But this doesn't change my gut feeling about the difference between these two novels. Maybe it's just because I feel more of a connection with Cassel's homework headaches and coffee consumption and family drama than I do with Jakkin's hard labor and boyish crushes, whereas my younger cousin -- still in junior high -- might have the reverse experience? Or maybe it's because mainstream media is clogged with sex and violence, desensitizing me to the impact of murder and corruption even in what is, ostensibly, a book for children? Or maybe I'm just crazy, and should never be allowed to recommend books to anyone under the age of eighteen.

All I really know is this: only some kids are like me, wandering libraries and bookstores in their free time, browsing book catalogs and standing on tip-toe to check out the books on the family bookshelves. Most kids only read what people suggest they should. And this makes me wonder, is there a point where not suggesting a book is just as bad as telling a kid not to read it in the first place?