See Dick. See Jane. See Dick dickover Jane
From "Pushing The Limits In Juvenile Fiction," Edmonton Journal, Oct 5/03 [no link available]:
As She Grows, a Canadian novel published by Penguin Canada earlier this year, is a case in point. Snow, the 15-year-old protagonist, lives with an abusive, alcoholic, mentally ill grandmother. Her 18-year-old drug-dealing boyfriend dumps her when she becomes pregnant. She's beaten and forced to perform oral sex by her best friend's 24-year-old boyfriend and is nearly raped by grandmother's creepy alcoholic boyfriend, who turns out to be her father.
(So -- her grandmother is, uh, her father's girlfriend. Got it.)
Dreamland, published by Penguin, a 2003 Reachers [sic] Choice Award for 2003, [sic] describes an abusive relationsip [sic] experienced by a high school senior at the hands of her drug-dealing, BWM [sic] driving boyfriend.
[I was going to bracket out all the illiteracies, but screw it. The Journal had its chance to hire me as a copy editor, but it didn't, so damned if I'm going to cover for its lousy writers.]
When Dad Killed Mom . . . is narrated by a 12-year-old boy and his older teenaged sister who discover as the plot unfolds that their psychologist father shot their mother when she threatened to leave him and expose him professionally after discovering his affair with a young patient. It's an unsettling drama of domestic violence and abuse that includes incestuous allusions between the father and daughter.
Speak . . . which deals with the rape of a 14-year-old girl by the most popular boy in the school and the ostracism she suffers from her peers."
"Well, class, do we detect a unifying theme here?"
"That the Journal's writers don't write so good?"
"Yes, but that's not it."
"That the Journal should have hired gnotalex as a copy editor when it had the chance?"
"Indubitably, but that's not it either."
"Uh, that men are scum?"
"Exactly! Class dismissed!"
Sheesh. It's enough to make you nostalgic for the Hardy Boys or Nancy Drew.
The purpose of literature isn't moral uplift; but neither is it to reflect a scabby worldview worthy of Andrea Dworkin.
I don't think it's unconnected that boys are falling far behind girls in reading and writing skills -- presented with this dreary PC diet (and many of these books are mandated reading by the militantly feminist public school establishment), I'd be inclined to pack it in, too.