So, here’s the thing. The Perfect Non-Reader is almost nine years old, and y’all know by know that she is, in fact, a reader of just about anything she can get her hands on. She is still the perfect non-reader of this Tohu Bohu, but really, I should find some other way to refer to her. What I’m talking about at the moment, though, is that she is one of those kids that can’t help reading any sort of printed matter that is nearby. I was that way. Some of you were, too, I’m sure. Breakfast cereal box, grocery store flyer, phone message for somebody else, book, pamphlet, warnings and instructions for power tools, anything at all. This is a Good Thing, on the whole, certainly when held as a contrast to those kids who will not read anything if they don’t have to. And, of course, with all that practice, she is a very good reader, capable of reading, well, anything at all, if we’re just talking about complexity of sentence structure and sophistication of vocabulary. I mean, yes, she was reading the Oz books before kindergarten started, so she isn’t likely to be frightened away by complex sentences and new words.
On the other hand, she is just eight years old. She doesn’t have the personal experience for lots of stuff. She knows a bit about sex (she read Sheila Kitzinger on Pregnancy and Childbirth) and a bit about romance, but has no real context to put any of that stuff in. Which is as it should be at this point, I think.
Anyway, I had picked up How to Ditch your Fairy at the Teen Room at our local public library, because I had enjoyed two of Justine Larbalestier’s earlier books. I had picked it up for me, and possibly for my Best Reader, but there it was on the library shelf, and my Perfect Non-Reader picked it up. And by the time I saw her with it, she was almost done.
Now, I had just started the thing, so I knew that it had a high-school setting, and that there was at least potential romantic stuff, but I had no idea where any of that was going. And I remembered a quite explicit sex scene in one of Ms. Larbalestier’s other books. I wouldn’t have been surprised by a sex scene in this one, or by some sort of complicated sexual situation, anyway. It was also possible that the book contained gruesome violence, although that would have surprised me at least somewhat given the tone of the book’s opening. Still, I thought I should open up the conversation with my Perfect Non-Reader. You know, did you have any questions about anything in the book and you know you can talk to me about anything and so on. And then it turned out that there wasn’t anything in the book, really, that was too teenage for this tween. So I just embarrassed us, which is what I do, because I’m the Papa, so that’s all right.
I know that I am well beyond the point where I read everything she reads. I read most of what she reads. I feel quite confident that there isn’t anything in her primary-school library that I am going to consider inappropriate for her age, what with it only going up to fifth grade anyway. And most of the stuff she gets from the library is from the kids’ room, and that’s all right, too. And when I take her up to the teen room, I’m participating in the choosing—in fact, I’m mostly picking up books off the shelf and showing them to her, for her to approve or spurn, rather than her picking up books and showing them to me. But because I read a lot of YA myself, though, I’m going to be bringing home books that I don’t think she is ready for. And she’s going to read them anyway.
I should probably add that of course our living room is largely furnished with bookshelves, and that most of the books on the living room shelves are not picked out as tween reading, or even teen reading. She has picked up things I thought were inappropriate (Dr. Fegg’s Nasty Book for Boys and Girls, for instance) but shrugged and let her have, and at least one thing (Love is Hell) that we told her was too old for her, but I am reasonably sanguine about her reading stuff that is too old for her. I mean, the real pornography is upstairs and tucked away, but there’s plenty of Chaucer and Balzac in the living room (not to mention the Ruby Hat of Omar Kay-ay-I am appalled!). And my shelf of plays, which has more sex and violence than any of the rest of it. But still.
Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.
I *used* to read a lot of YA fiction. Lately I’ve hardly been reading anything at all. But one of the few things I did read not too long ago was a run of Larbalestier books. Did you *like* _How to Ditch Your Fairy_? 🙂
Kids tend, in my experience, to be pretty good self-censors. I picked up most of the books my mother left in the bathroom when I was a kid — I recall trying to read The Handmaid’s Tale and just being largely confused. I understood the words fine, but I didn’t have a context in which to understand their import, and I abandoned the book soon after. I frequently see kids at the library here pick up YA or adult books, start reading, hit upon something, say “EWW!” and put the book back on the shelf.
Melissa—it was pretty good, I thought. The whole fairy business didn’t altogether work for me, though. The conceit is that most people have a ‘fairy’ that gives them tremendous luck in some specific aspect of their lives. Our main character has a parking fairy, and always gets a good parking space. That sort of thing. The problem was that our characters are high school sports stars (at a magnet school for athletics) and many of them have sports fairies of one kind or another. And that seemed like cheating to me. So I was cranky about that throughout. Still, a charming book in a lot of ways.
Laura—yes, I do count on some self-censorship. I was much the same as a child as my daughter is now, and read well above my weight. My big experience was attempting Ulysses whilst in grade school. And it didn’t do me any harm. Did it?
Thanks,
-V.