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?

Writing across differences

At what point does writing about characters who are different from you turn into an appropriation of a "foreign" (to you) gender, race, ethnicity, culture, religion, or sexual orientation?

I'm not entirely sure why, but I've been pondering this question quite a bit lately. If anything, it's probably because I've been realizing the extent to which the characters I spend the most time writing tend to have life experiences fundamentally similar to mine. They are typically girls or women from middle-middle class suburban families; they almost always have siblings, and two working parents; if their religion (or occasional lack thereof) ever impinges upon the plot, it is within a (generally Protestant) Christian context; and whether I'm writing about the here-and-now, or pre-revolutionary France, or a colony planet in the 23rd century, my main characters generally belong to the ethnic/racial identity that dominates their city, state, region, or even country (excepting, of course, the occasional alien).

I'm not saying that there is anything exactly wrong with the fact that I tend to envision protagonists with concerns similar to mine -- as much as I hate the dictum "Write what you know" for the way it gets bandied about indiscriminately, I do feel it's easiest to write characters whose mental landscapes you can connect with. Following this line of thought, when I do introduce characters whose experiences of the world have been different from mine, they're generally characters whose experiences I've been able to extrapolate or understand to a certain extent through those of my friends and family. For example, I don't feel uncomfortable writing about gay or lesbian characters, because even though I may identify as straight, I have a lot of friends who don't, and who've been frank with me about their experiences (not because I've ever asked, as a way of intentionally "doing research," but because we're friends, and things just come up).

But -- and I can't tell whether to blame this on "middle-class guilt," or too much time spent in English classes analyzing the issues of writing across race and gender, or just being a considerate human being -- I sometimes wonder about the larger implications of people from a supposedly "dominant" gender, race, ethnicity, culture, religion, or sexual orientation writing about characters from different backgrounds that are perceived as less socially accepted or empowered. When I portray gay or lesbian characters as main or supporting characters in my stories, am I doing my part to vindicate the fundamental humanity of a group that has suffered discrimination, or is my portrayal from a position of incomplete experience an appropriation of a subject position I have never personally held? Do some stories only belong to those who have lived through them, and if I as an outsider attempt to write those stories, am I merely buying into a notion of my own dominance that allows me to "know" these people even those I'm not one of them?

At the moment, I'm inclined to think that, provided I am knowledgeable and respectful and honest about the characters I'm treating, there is nothing wrong with attempting to write across such differences. In fact, I think that writing -- fiction in particular -- is one of the most extraordinary vehicles we have for promoting an understanding that bridges these differences, and if everyone was restricted to writing only what they knew, it might do more to promote a cultural insulation than to break it down. But the outcry against those who try to write across differences and are perceived as failing is often so strong that I'm never entirely certain, and I'm really interested in what anyone else might have to say about this topic.

Read This Book: Stone Butch Blues by Leslie Feinberg

There are those books that people recommend to you over the years, but that always remain forgotten at the bottom of your "to-read" list, because you're not quite sure what they're going to be about or what you're going to get out of them or exactly why you should invest the time to find out -- until one day, for no apparent reason, you remember a title in the bookstore or at the library and then the book is in your hands and you have no choice but to read it.

For me, Stone Butch Blues by Leslie Feinberg is one of those books. It was first recommended over a year ago by someone whose taste in literature I trust implicitly -- possibly because she is the only other person in the world who obsesses over both of my obscure favorite authors -- but though I even went so far as to text the title to myself (so that I would have it with me the next time I was in a bookstore or library), I never actually thought to purchase or borrow it when I had the opportunity. It took the actions of another friend to remind me of this book, and my desire to procrastinate on my thesis research fueled my decision to search it out at the local library.

I started this book less than six hours ago, at the start of a work-out on one of the elliptical machines at the gym and not knowing what to expect. Half an hour and forty-some-odd pages later, I had to cut my work-out short because I didn't particularly want to start crying in the middle of the UC Berkeley Recreational Sports Facility. Feinberg's portrayal of the seemingly insurmountable barriers faced by the protagonist Jess -- a Jewish butch girl from a working-class family growing up in the 1950s -- made me angry at history. But the tears didn't threaten to start until I remembered that, for some people, many of whom I am proud to call my friends, the kind of discrimination the novel depicts is anything but history. Sexism, racism, anti-Semitism, homophobia, transphobia, class prejudice: all of these are just as alive in the present as they were in 1950. Derogatory slurs, employer discrimination, physical abuse, and sexual assault still face people who are perceived as "different."

Feinberg's novel is ultimately a bildungsroman, a story that follows the growth and development of an individual from childhood to maturity and beyond, but its power comes from the intersection of this basic form and its unflinching (and historically informed) depiction of the butch-femme subculture with which I, for one, was completely unfamiliar. Although the account is fictional, I feel like being inside Jess's head for a few hundred pages introduced me to more of the butch experience than any non-fictional format could have. I'm certainly not presuming to really know what it's really like to be butch simply because I've read one person's take on it, but I've always believed that one of the first steps towards increased understanding and acceptance of any ostracized or excluded group is to give that presumed "other" a voice. For a few hundred pages I felt Jess's pains and joys, lived inside Jess's mind and dealt with Jess's problems and questions, and through this fiction I was able to be let into an interior world with which I'd otherwise have little to no contact.

What's more, the form of the novel, rather than drawing rigid distinctions and placing uncomplicated labels on people and forms of behavior, presents the reader with something that I would consider truer to the complex and complicated intersections between these labels and the real results of their inadequacies. It made me question the labels that I use and the assumptions that I make about individuals based upon appearance or behavior, and it did so without trying to give me "answers" -- which are often just a new set of labels. Jess identifies as butch, but it's obvious this word has different meanings to different individuals, and rather than try to codify it or provide it with a specific, exclusive meaning, Feinberg's book explores the nuanced ways in which different characters may perform the same label.

The novel is also incredibly brilliant for the way it made me look twice at pronouns. In case you haven't noticed, so far in this post I have yet to assign a gendered pronoun to either Feinberg or Jess. In Feinberg's "About the Author" blurb, ze discusses hir life and accomplishments using commonly-accepted gender-neutral pronouns (a great introduction to which can be found here). But Jess's case seems more complicated. At birth, Jess is biologically female. However, as a butch Jess's character can often come across as masculine, and later in the novel Jess begins to take male hormones and successfully "passes" as a man for several years before deciding to stop hormone treatments. Since the novel is narrated from Jess's first person point of view, the only pronoun Jess ever uses to refer to hirself is "I": all of the gendered pronouns of the novel are bestowed upon Jess by others around hir (though I was interested to note that to Jess, fellow butches were still "shes").

Some people scoff at the idea of a gender-neutral pronoun and may be inclined to think that those who use them or demand their use are simply trying to making a political statement. But pronoun use isn't just a political act for Jess. The pronouns people use to describe and discuss hir have a great effect on hir life and hir own self-concept. When growing up, Jess is frequently called a "he-she," and though the term is used in an incredibly derogatory manner it becomes the only one with which Jess can fully identify. Later on, Jess has to deal with other people on the streets, confused by hir gender ambiguity, referring to hir as "it." But the pain of an improper pronoun isn't just emotional: when passing as a man, being referred to by others as "she" could lose Jess hir job.

The real glory of this novel is that it manages to tackle such massive political and personal issues without becoming a manifesto. Feinberg doesn't tell hir readers what to think. Instead, ze presents hir readers with an account of the way the world looks through Jess's eyes, and asks the reader to make his, her, or hir own judgments regarding the politics of the situation. I can't speak for all of the readers who have encountered this novel since its publication, but for me, Stone Butch Blues ultimately reaffirmed two important ideas about the world: first, that hate, anger, and violence are real things that affect real people, but second (and more importantly) that love, respect, and understanding are powerful counter-forces that, if marshaled correctly, can encourage and support necessary action.

Still, in the end, nothing I say about Stone Butch Blues can explain the powerful experience of reading it, and reading this post is no substitute for going out and getting yourself a copy of the novel. I meant what I said in the title: read this book. And if you have (or when you do), please leave a comment behind -- I'd love to hear what others have to say on the subject.