Comments on: Age appropriate reading material…or not?

By: marmite and tea

marmite and tea — Wed, 09 Jul 2008 15:55:12 +0000

My catholic school didn’t approve either. I actually remember an assembly on the evils of Judy Blume !

I love your point that all us bookworms were actually inside reading about sex rather than out doing it!

By: Eileen

Eileen — Tue, 08 Jul 2008 21:14:18 +0000

As you can imagine my Catholic school didn’t approve of Forever- which meant I couldn’t wait to read it. : )

By: Joelle

Joelle — Tue, 08 Jul 2008 21:13:18 +0000

Jay, that’s very funny! The only book I wasn’t supposed to read was WIFEY by Judy Blume. Of course I did anyway and I don’t really know why it was banned. At least in my memory now, it didn’t seem like that big of a deal. Boy, I wish we’d had some of the great stuff being written for YA now back then! I lived on Fireside romances because they weren’t as sappy as some of the others, but something like Boyproof would’ve knocked my socks off back then! I would’ve felt so understood.

By: Jay Montville

Jay Montville — Tue, 08 Jul 2008 21:00:04 +0000

OMG, Forever. I totally got in trouble for that one at school, when I checked it out of the school library. They had to call my mom for permission (which she gave).

True story–when I was 12, my mother told me that I had permission to read any book on the bookshelf. My first choice? Mandingo by Kyle Onstott. Which I took to school for RIF (Reading is Fundamental-a program in which we had to read for fifteen minutes a day). You can imagine the phone call home that day!

My mother’s response when I got home? “Jay, you can read any book on the book shelf, but DON’T TAKE THE BOOKS FROM THE TOP SHELF TO SCHOOL.” My mom is awesome.

And, while Mandingo (and its sequels) were quite explicit about both sex and the horrors of slavery, when we got to the Civil War unit in history, I was waaaayyy ahead of the rest of the class.