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…if I had removed all the dark books I read as a kid, I really would not have read much of anything. I hated high school and was so conflicted over what I was going through and feeling that books were my salvation. Cannot imagine culling my reading to only the happy fluff. The happy fluff did not show that others were just as screwed up as I was.
Over the weekend, The Wall Street Journal ran a piece claiming that fiction at least nominally aimed at readers under 18 — young adult or “YA” fiction, that is — is entirely too dark. Calling out the books about kids who cut themselves or suffer abuse right alongside the books with abundant profanity in them, it laments the fact that young readers will be “surrounded by images not of joy or beauty but of damage, brutality and losses of the most horrendous kinds.”
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