“Look, Mommy, there’s a book about different kinds of fruit. That sounds interesting,” says Klara at the public library.
Of course, it immediately turned out that “fruit” is a dubiously appropriate metaphor for the only thing we should all be concentrating on 24/7, which is obviously sex:
DIFFERENT KINDS OF FRUIT
In this funny and hugely heartfelt novel from the Newbery Honor-winning author of Too Bright to See, a sixth-grader’s life is turned upside down when she learns her dad is trans.
People who are living on a different planet will say, “what’s the big deal? It’s just one book.” But it’s not one book. 100% of books featured at the library (meaning, taken purposefully out of the stacks and exhibited prominently where kids will see them) are aggressively woke. All of them. Always.
I don’t object to such a book being published or being present at the public library. What I do object to is that subject matter which is of interest to the smallest percentage of the population is constantly, insistently and relentlessly shoved into everybody else’s face.
It started with “why can’t we be left in peace to love whomever we love and be whatever we are” and somehow led to the place where I have to explain to my 7-year-old that pussy and fruit mean something different to some people and we should go home and order books online instead.
Clarissa's Blog 
I have boys. Absolutely does not matter what’s set out enticingly on display. They still head straight for the airplanes and tractors section (and our library is very woke). I’m sure it’s possible, but I haven’t seen any woke tractor or airplane books yet. Not even a woke WWII biography or a woke book about the Apollo program (what the eldest is into these days).
What really gets me is the billboards in our area. Probably half of them (the half not advertising personal injury lawyers) are PSAs for adult topics that I don’t want to discuss with my 8yo, but boy do they read the things and ask about them! Just off the top of my head:
–“drug-resistant gonorrhea alert! freeSTDcheck.com”
–“Not ready to be a parent? Useacondom.com”
–Narcan
–Pregnant? Need help? (crisis pregnancy center)
–Stick around and be a dad! (my kids of course are miffed: why would you need to advertise for that??)
–Don’t abandon your baby just anywhere! Check out our safe drop-off locations!
–Free HIV testing
You can tell what a classy town we live in. I’m relieved whenever I see a new “Let me buy your junk car!” billboard go up, because it features a dweeby guy in a silly crown holding up a lincoln towncar, and is jolly clean fun. The complete opposite of when we’re driving around town and the back seat is struggling to sound out “gonorrhea”… “gone-hear… uh… mama what’s gone-hear-uh?” (I dunno kid I’ve never heard that word before).
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Oh, and I forgot all the “come to our office to get your medical marijuana scrip!” billboards. Those are easy by comparison.
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This is a great comment. What can we do but laugh in the midst of all this?
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There are days it makes me wish I’d got my kids some electronic devices, so they’d be staring at those instead.
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It’s going to be true soon enough.
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Your library is weird! Our local library doubtless has some books like this but as far as I can tell, the children’s section predominantly features dragons (to my daughter’s delight). I think they do make sure the “featured” books on display have a range of races represented, which I am 100% on board with, but that’s about it. And I live in a very liberal part of Southern California.
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Lucky break. Do you have older librarians running the kids’ department?
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Last time I looked at the children’s section of my library, “The Hips on the Drag Queen Go Swish Swish Swish” was prominently on display. Don’t know if this is the norm, since I don’t usually go to that section, but unfortunately I think it is.
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” as far as I can tell”
The point of the post is that the cover doesn’t tell you very much…. so unless you pick up and look at the books it’s hard to say what’s going on….
“I live in a very liberal part”
I think (putting on marxist glasses) that a better dividing line might be income… a feature of the last…. 20? 30? more? years is the elite pushing policies and ideas that are ruinous for anyone without massive resources to act as a cushion… (and not getting involved themselves).
The explosion in trans kids stuff seems aimed at the middle class with the goal of hobbling them economically (the surgeries, for example, are expensive and almost always require expensive repair work….)
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At times, it almost looks as if there were a secret cabal of homophobes who want to reverse the gains in gay acceptance by making LGBT odious to normies. I saw a poll yesterday showing that gay acceptance is decreasing for the first time in years.
Everybody was supportive when the argument was “we just want to be left in peace to live our lives.” But then it became “we are going to hassle you within an inch of your lives with our stuff”, and it’s very counterproductive.
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Not just by making it odious to normies, but by actively physically injuring the up-and-coming generation of kids who might otherwise have just been gay.
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“actively physically injuring the up-and-coming generation of kids who might otherwise have just been gay”
That too! And in the case of young women, physically injuring them and locking them into an identity that most would almost certainly grow out of…. most tomboys end up as pretty normal heterosexuals as adults….
So many people write that they can’t imagine if this stuff was going on when they were growing up….
And (last but not least) a lot of ‘trans kids’ are clearly being coached by and performing for their attention-starved parents (usually mothers though there’s at least one father I know of).
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I’ve written that. A lot of times. I’ve always been fairly androgynous. I was really into reading and archaeology and gardening and botany– like from the age of 8 or so (maybe when my mother gave me that first sprouted garlic bulb to plant in the flowerbed: magic!)– and this doesn’t fit neatly into anybody’s “boy stuff” or “girl stuff” equation. Not masculine, not feminine, just the hugest dork imaginable. I’m also straight and happily married, raising great kids and growing amazingly tasty native landrace pumpkins.
These days people would have you believe that’s not possible, and I look with absolute bone-chilling horror on what’s being done now to girls like me. It was bad enough just being ostracized by my peers. Now it’s like…. it’s like if instead of ignoring me, everybody had been telling me “yeah you should just go kill yourself”. Only it’s more insidious than that. It’s like “Oh, you poor thing! Just let us mutilate you and then you’ll finally fit in! Do this horrible permanent damage to your body and you can be one of the cool kids! Everyone will accept you! It’s not that teenagers are assholes and things will get better as you get older– no, it’s that you just have to follow these ten steps, and then you’ll be lovable and acceptable. Celebrated, even.
What lonely teenage dork could resist?
What a shock to get to the other side of all that, and realize you are now scarred for life, can’t have kids, you’re a bigger freak than ever before, and a lot of it’s not reversible. Ostracism was thoughtlessly cruel. This is aggressively evil.
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My kid was so into princess dresses when she was 4, it was funny. Then, it was as if a switch was flipped. It’s all pants, T-shirts and an ancient baseball cap she calls her friend. Somebody at the resort addressed her as “princess”, and she barked at them. Refuses to let me put her hair into any sort of a hairstyle. It’s now all super heroes and dragons. It was the same thing with my niece, so I’m guessing it’s a stage many of them go through. It means absolutely nothing, and I pity the people who read some major stuff into it. She might change her mind and become a girly girl. Or not. Who cares? My sister decided to go heavy into the feminine stuff when she turned 40. So what? It means absolutely nothing about who she is as a human being.
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“homophobes who want to reverse the gains in gay acceptance by making LGBT odious ”
Long ago on gender critical twitter I discovered there was a large number of gays and lesbians who are horrified by recent excesses of the trans agenda and stuff like drag queen story hour.
They complain that not only does transmania reduce acceptance of more mundane gay people but there’s a very wide streak of homophobia within the trans agenda….
And there’s also a lot of rewriting of history retroactively transing people who are no longer alive to challenge them….
Just poison all the way around…
Every modern ‘social’ movement is like acid corroding the mechanisms that a healthy society needs…
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The really obnoxious stuff like this is the most noticeable. But stuff that’s a bit milder, but more insidious to the point it’s the air we breathe, feels like it could be worse in the long run.
80+% of movies, books, etc. nowadays seem to have a plot along the lines of “our hero(ine) leaves behind the old, conservative, bad world in favor of a new, progressive, good world.” Probably higher for kids movies. There’s a few little variants when people wanna get creative (ex. “our heroine rebels against the harsh, patriarchal culture of her family by embracing the SEXY, RAUNCHY culture of her peers. However, eventually she realizes this is just a different kind of misogyny and finds a more truly feminist/empowering ‘middle path.’”)
Many of these movies and books are fine, even good. But it’s just one, overwhelming story, being told over and over again. This is just one common, persistent theme, I’m sure you could think of others.
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If you’ve taken a dip into YA literature any time recently… cor. I keep tabs on the genre because some of my favorite writers have written really enjoyable books for it– Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett come to mind– and I keep hoping to run into whatever authors are filling that niche these days: thoughtful, funny, well-written stories that I can finish in an afternoon with a migraine (i.e. they don’t ask too much of my intellect), and free of graphic “adult” content.
That entire market is a trash-heap right now.
Just crammed with endless Twilight/HungerGames fanfic written by people who sat back and thought: “I really enjoyed Twilight/HungerGames– if only they could be more woke and less coherent…”
There seem to be some rules for the genre as it currently exists:
Heroines have no agency. They are largely passive and can only react to events, and exist largely as a blank-slate POV, so can’t have much of a personality (because if they had any actual thoughts, some readers might not like them?). Their main role is to be accepting.
Heroes are gelatinous blobs. They use their phones for everything, don’t talk to people, don’t know what’s going on (and largely do not care), and don’t know what they want or how to get it. (See the first installment of Miss Peregrine for a typical example)
Parents are completely irrelevant, any time they are not actively evil. There’s no such thing as a good parent, unless that parent is dead and exists only in fond memories.
The only character trait that matters is “quirkiness”. This is an ill-defined feature that could be almost anything, and it’s how you know the character is supposed to be sympathetic. He/she is “quirky”. I read one recently where almost the only intel you get about the main POV character is that she has “quirky hair”– and you can tell from context that this 100% explains why anybody else in the story likes her. It’s the quirky hair. She has no thoughts, no opinions, no preferences, no non-passive interactions, and is in fact one of the most boring characters ever written… but hey, quirky hair so it’s cool, right?
A few more of these, and perhaps I’ll have extracted a complete set of rules…
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I read a totally different kind of YA novels than you but I have noticed the same decline. I think my time with YA was coming to a natural end anyway but that sure helped hasten it. I’m still trying to find a substitute genre for my “low intellectual demands” reading. Quickly determined that modern romance novels have all the same problems as YA (probably because they’re written for the exact same audience), next up for me is thrillers, maybe.
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Indeed. And the problem with older novels is of course, limited supply. Once you’ve read all the silly Georgette Heyer novels… well, there aren’t any more.
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Ruth Rendell, said she in a whisper. :-)))
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She’s great, but not quite low enough on the intellectual demand scale (for me, YMMV). We are talking about airplane reading here– stuff you can read while feeling nauseous, or in a noisy terminal where you have to keep an eye on the time and listen for PA announcements, or with noisy kids running around (without completely ignoring them)…
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I think she’ll be low IQ enough for my needs, which is why she’s been on the list!
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“Parents are completely irrelevant, any time they are not actively evil. There’s no such thing as a good parent, unless that parent is dead and exists only in fond memories.” One of my friends has complained about this exact issue, but with mothers specifically, and it extends beyond YA. She has always had a good relationship with her mother, even as a teenager, so she finds it very annoying.
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I recently read one that was a blatant Twilight ripoff (instead of vampires who can’t go out in daylight because they’re sparkly, we have people who can’t go out in moonlight, because they glow (intense eyerolling here). The only living mother in the whole book belonged to the uptight rich-people family, had no role in the book, basically just a houseplant. Everybody else– the three most prominent characters in the story all had mothers who died before middle-age.
I felt that, given the circumstances, the real mystery in the book was what horrible genetic disorder runs in the families of this small southern town, that causes apparently-healthy women to drop dead before forty??? Which TBH would have been a much more interesting story. But it is never once remarked on. Like… what are the odds?
It still irritates me.
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“the three most prominent characters in the story all had mothers who died before middle-age”
Isn’t this wish-fulfillment for teenage girls who are nervous about going through a battle for dominance with their mothers?
“If Mom’s dead I don’t have to rebel against her and can just be irresistible to all the bad boys with my quirky hair…..”
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Probably something like that. Let us go have wish-fulfillment adventures in a world where I don’t have to deal with my mom. And where my quirky hair is enough to make me lovable.
Which is why wish-fulfillment fantasies are so dreadfully boring, even though, on the surface, they’re all about *cool out-of-the-ordinary things happening. It’s just that those things don’t require the POV character to… grow up, make hard decisions, ask any interesting questions, make horrible mistakes, sort out complex problems that they are contributing to, or do anything truly difficult. Just be the quirky person you are, and everything will come out right…
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Quirkiness is precisely the word that Richard Sennett used to describe the personality ideal that arose in response to the new economy. People try to sell quirkiness because they feel that it’s in demand instead of the compliance and obedience of the industrial model. And that’s what we see in literature. It’s pathetic, of course. It doesn’t lead anywhere good but here we have it.
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Yes, and it results in everybody being quirky by… getting a septum piercing, dyeing their hair lavender, and wearing dorky glasses. It’s like the quirky uniform for the Cult of Quirk.
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We should be grateful the book said what it would be about accurately. I’ve heard of a kid picking up a book about basketball and they find a random lesbian sex scene thrown into the middle of the story.
I didn’t care one bit about whether someone was gay or trans until a few years ago when within a year or two of each other
1) a man with penis was allowed to be in pool female changing area
and
2) drag queen story hour happened at our elementary school “Winter Fair” at which Santa was not welcome
I was annoyed and I wanted to remove myself from these situations, but In the last year or two I’ve blown a gasket over medically transitioning kids.
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That’s exactly what I hate, the sneakiness. I have to research every book and cartoon because I can’t trust it to not have this crap randomly making an inappropriate and unnecessary appearance.
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Yeah, my husband and I have been reading a LOT of juvie fiction lately, for this very reason. We are keeping the kids supplied with stuff we liked as kids, for as long as possible. But everything published in the last five (ten?) years, we have to read first, for vetting purposes. Fiction for their age group right now is 99% Harry Potter ripoffs, so this has been (swearing goes here) tedious.
I am ready to throw in the towel and just say they can’t read anything published after 2013.
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The problem is hugely compounded because my 11yo is reading at an adult level now, and that’s an even weirder minefield to navigate– what’s OK to read after Tom Clancy and Michael Crichton? I mostly leave it to my husband, because dinosaurs and cold-war military thrillers are not really my bag.
Any suggestions from the commentariat?
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Agatha Christie
And aimed at youth, the Michael Vey series.
Also a trilogy starting with Rule of Three – has some bad guys being bad and they don’t win. The good guy stays good and grapples with moral and. Life or death decisions
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I’ll check those out.
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