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It stinks. The less said, the better.

Oh, I've had this one on my flaming to-do list for a while. Just need to wrap up a few things, and I'm all over it.

Wish you could be there.... if that helps at all.

I'm a little grumpy, too. The cool thing, however is, that you are in Scotland! While I am in Seattle. Hmmm... maybe it's time for a coffee/Scotch-egg exchange. (Did I tell you that I visited Scotland for a week in 1999?)

Yikes! This is just creepy.

See, I didn't want to be the one to say that.

Raised a religious conservative myself, I know the... background of this a little more, maybe, but it gives ME the heebs. Not good.

I had a similar reaction when I saw the title: Girls Gone Mild.

On one hand, well, yeah, some of the mainstream stuff is just awful. But on the other? I'm wondering about agendas, and I really, really HATE agendas and when people attempt to manipulate me.

I agree, Jackie! That's a major issue for me--feeling like somebody's agenda is being forced on me.

And I do understand the background a bit--at least insofar as my dad was constantly on my back about articles of clothing he thought were immodest, but which would be quite tame by today's standards...legging-style stirrup pants are nothing compared to buttcrack-baring jeans, in my opinion...

I find a lot of hate for agendas manipulating kids. No matter how smart, they often don't have the wherewithal to be deep, consistent, critical thinkers or to express their thoughts passionately and coherently, and so are pushed back and forth by every wind of thought and often can't quite speak up about how it makes them feel.

I know some of the reasons behind this type of thing from the religious perspective, and the fears of some of the adults or whatever concerns within religious groups, but it's creepy to have sort of a MOVEMENT toward anything. Like, 'we Stepford Mamas are MOVING: move with us or be mowed down.'

Erg.

Oh, you smart women you. It's a pleasure to hang out with you all. Have you ever seen the extremely modest swimwear?

For girls there's always an agenda it seems...

Extremely modest swimwear!?

What, it's more modest than a tankini? Is it swim sweats now? (Will the undertow drag one down in them?)

Oh, dear--I just looked at the swimwear. It looks like something my dad might have tried to get me to wear when I was a teenager (if it had existed then)....immediately followed by me bursting into laughter. Fortunately, I don't recall him making too big a deal about my bathing suits, since I wasn't a bikini person anyway!

Okay: seen it.
'Modest' is becoming a bad word.

I agree with your post with the exception of your Matt Damon example. I mean, Matt Damon wrote GOOD WILL HUNTING which won an Oscar for Best Screenplay Written Directly for the Screen (1998). I'd imagine if he set his mind to writing a novel he could write a pretty darn good one. Now, if you used Paula Abdul as an example....

You know what? I forgot that, and I TOTALLY take your point. Though I believe that screen writing IS completely different, I will change my example.

To ...Paula ABDUL!? Yikes.

We might think about the resurgence of WWII as a topic in light of the current non-war. The only war I know of which met "just war" principles was WWII, and the manner in which it was conducted wasn't entirely ethical. So, it's probably the only example easily related to by readers ... and is rather sad, actually.

Besides - if you were a follower, would your manuscript be complete? Would you have started writing it, oh, 3 years ago?

(I linked to the Wiki article, just because it states the theory most succinctly ... but it's not the best, if it's something you're really interested in)

Yeah, and imagine MY surprise when I thought about my earlier manuscript, which has some WWII-era historical elements (but is set in the modern day). And I started that--when? Actually, back in 2001, I think.

Eh.

Well,Paula Abdul IS a songwriter and "Cold Hearted Snake" really just needs some Eric Carle artwork to take off. Oh, that mischevious snake! He don't play by rules!

Aaaaah!
The thought of Eric Carle illustrating the coldhearted snake...

Ohh, that was bad. Bad, bad, bad. And now that song will be in my head for the rest of the day.

Thanks, Sam!

I think the Jolie book is just a matter of time. And I will NOT read it.

Hey, TadMack -- here's a much more palatable slice of youngfolk literary news out of Washington this week. Enjoy!

"Jenna's book tour"! Move over and give me some space in that basin.

Chris, I owe you one.
Much better news! I wish I had read Slaughterhouse-5 at thirteen!!

And yes, Diane. We can take turns...

Chris: that IS better news :) I enjoyed that article too.

Tadmack: I see you couldn't help yourself!!

As Jane Yolen points out, these people are hogging much of the available oxygen.

Hey TadMack...thanks for the hug. It was great getting to see you, however briefly.

Thanks for posting this. I was really curious as to what you guys spoke about, and I wish I could have been there to see it!

This was great, TadMack - as you know, I had a few of the same thoughts cross my mind. I'll post some of my conference reactions tomorrow.

I wish I could have been there, too!

I've decided that if I ever meet John Green or Neil Gaiman, my greeting will be, "Hello, fellow blogger."

Very funny!

Good one!

Dude, it's a HIGH horse, a high horse. So, it's not going to look... natural.

Seriously, though, it looks great. And I'm unbelievably annoyed by this yammering on and on on this topic. A lot of ASSuming is going on.

I try not to think about it too much, but I know what you mean. Love the cartoon! It does all boil down to free speech, and people trying to defend an elitist old guard that others don't care about.

I had dinner with a friend last night who struggles to find good books for his three kids to read, because he wants them to be readers. And he said that reading my blog helps with that. And that's really what it's all about, for me.

That's great, Jen! I love to hear that. I always feel like I'm doing someone a service when I can point them to great sites like yours, or Edge of the Forest or any of the other great sites out there, when they're looking for reading material for their kids.

GREAT cartoon, Sarah! It's perfect.

BTW: I grew up in Hemet, believe it or not :) It was great when I was a child, but has gone downhill since! I then went to Berkeley for undergrad and UCLA for grad school. Now I'm in IOWA. Ah, the academic life. It's a lot like the military in the sense that you can't always choose where you live.

Oh, how funny! My stepdad used to work at an optometrist's office in Hemet.

Coincidentally, I also went to Berkeley for my undergrad. It was a nice change from Riverside, let me tell you!

Cool, Sarah! He didn't work at Dr. King's office did he?

Berkeley was a nice change from the old Inland Empire--though the first guy I dated could tell "I came from a small town." Sigh. I thought I had them all fooled :)

No, I think it was Dr. Scruggs, but that was a long time ago so I'm not sure...my stepdad's career has gone through various incarnations and since then he has become a high school science teacher! (At San Gorgonio, which you probably know of!)

Yes, yes, yes and yes. To everything you said. I couldn't agree more wholeheartedly.

Great post! I like how you address the blogging ambivalence, too. There are days I wanna give it all up, but then you really connect with a reader or some such thing . . . and it's all worth it again.

Thanks, Jackie and Jules!!

Nice post . . . kudos to you. :)

I work as a teacher in an urban school in Salt Lake City. After working all day, I come home to be with my three recently adopted daughters who are still mastering English and who are still becoming passionate readers. My first steps into the kidlitosphere were through Esme Codell's blog. I gradually expanded the blogs I read, and have often added and often pruned my personal blog roll.

I am very grateful for the constant flow of thoughtful recommendations provided by bloggers in kidlit land. Due to time constraints, and my reasons for being here in the first place, I often lurk, but rarely post. This discussion, however, merits the input of folks like me. To all the blog naysayers, I'd reply: give me some credit. I don't rush out and buy every book I see recommended. I don't read every blog with the same level of trust. Bloggers have to earn my trust to keep my attention. I have a nifty link to my local library in order to quickly request books I see recommended. But I only request a small fraction of all the books I read about, and I only share with my daughters and students the best of the books I check-out. But after these several levels of discrimination, my students and my girls end up with plenty of excellent books. Please know that the work that you do is well appreciated. My list of great books I first heard about on a kid lit blog (in the year I've been hanging around reading them) would likely include about 250 titles. That's a lot of books, which are now part of my teaching repitoire, books I can match and share with lots of great kids.

Very nicely said. I couldn't agree with you more.

We inform each other and learn from one another, and so yes, I do feel responsible for the quality of what appears here--I want it to be informative, or useful, or entertaining.

Yes! Well said! I'm with you.

AF, quoting makes me sound so intelligent!

I was entirely inarticulate on this subject, but you've done a great job with this. And thank you, Jackie, Jules, Erin Amy, Hip Mama and Clouds for speaking up. We wouldn't be us without you...

Thanks for the shoutout!

You're VERY welcome, and I love your site!

I'm so glad. I enjoy your site, too. In case you're interested, here is another post for Children's Books That Never Were:

Misgiving Tree.

"The ideal children's book has lots of hidden passages in it, and dream states that can be due to drugs, and powerful women who eat little boys and girls."

Let's see ... those hidden passages? How does she propose they get printed? 'Cause unless I'm mistaken, they don't do magic ink in mass publication. And dream states due to drugs? Does she propose that they incorporate blotter paper into the front cover? Something like a single-use LSD trip included with every copy? And the whole powerful women eating boys and girls? I'm thinking that you don't really want to examine this any further whatsoever.

Where do you find these people?

Oh. Yeah. The Internet. Where you can find anything.

You did better a job digesting this material than I did. Honestly, I had a difficult time understanding what she was trying to say but then again I have no lingering thoughts of Babar's butt so maybe I'm just falling into a gender stereotype lump?

Your teddy bear story is totally a story in itself.

Thank you for the email. I'm sorry that you can't have cats, because they have made my life so happy. They make me feel so loved. I miss her so much.

Your word verification just made me cry.

That whole "except in the sense that Judy Blume books are classics" phrase really bothers me. What makes a YA classic an exception? And why do we even need qualifiers if we're discussing YA classics, as if being YA makes a book somehow less legitimate than a book written for an adult audience?

My favorite books that I read as a young adult will always be special to me, and occupy a place that no adult book ever will--it's the time in my life when I did the most reading for fun, and for teens in general I think it's a crucial time to either gain or lose lifelong readers. I think it's rather belittling to dismiss the entire genre, especially if you're trying to write for that age group. It doesn't send a positive message to the readers you're trying to reach--who are much more savvy about being marketed to than seems to be the prevailing assumption.

I actually theorize that a lot of this marketing appeals (deliberately or not) rather to parents of teens who want them to read certain books, or who are trying to recapture what they see as their ideal years.

I've really been not wanting to respond to this article because it makes me so annoyed but you did a great job here.

As for the "except in the sense that Judy Blume books are classics" comment - I would think any author would be happy to know that there books had changed the lives of generations of young girls, like Blume's books have (especially Are you There God, It's Me Margaret and Forever).

I mean, I'm sorry, how higher of a standard than that can a writer wish for?

Colleen aks Chasing Ray

Oh, sounds like this guy wrote a book, shopped it around, and didn't like the reception it received. Frankly, this feels much like Madonna's claim that nobody's writing decent children's books, so she had to step in there and write one for herself...

Hee! All the talk of voodoo reminded me of a website I once wrote about for my Weird Wild Web column on IGN.com - Pinstruck. You can send an electronic voodoo curse to someone. The link above goes to the Web Wayback Machine version--I'm not sure you can actually use it to send a curse, but the site's still mildly amusing.

TadMack, you get an A+ for effort!

...or listen to the book as read by Anton Lesser. He brings the book to life with characterizations that are just right, not over done. He narrates all three of the Sally Lockhart books, brilliantly.

Good point, and thanks for the reminder -- there are other ways to dramatize other than film!!