aprilhenry

Have you seen this absolutely ridiculous piece in the Wall Street Journal? http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702303657404576357622592697038.html

The subhead is "Contemporary fiction for teens is rife with explicit abuse, violence and depravity. Why is this considered a good idea?" That might give you an idea of the tone.

She also says, "Pathologies that went undescribed in print 40 years ago, that were still only sparingly outlined a generation ago, are now spelled out in stomach-clenching detail. Profanity that would get a song or movie branded with a parental warning is, in young-adult novels, so commonplace that most reviewers do not even remark upon it."

And "The novel "Scars," a dreadfully clunky 2010 exercise by Cheryl Rainfield that School Library Journal inexplicably called "one heck of a good book," ran into difficulties earlier this year at the Boone County Library in Kentucky, but not because of its contents. A patron complained that the book's depiction of cutting—the cover shows a horribly scarred forearm—might trigger a sufferer's relapse." It hurt to read those words, knowing that is Cheryl's own arms on the cover of that book. For Cheryl, describing how a girl survives child abuse by cutting is not some marketing ploy.

With loaded words like "lurid" and "depraved," this piece is guaranteed to make your blood boil.