Should Children Read Whatever They Want?
By Catherine Evans
I’ve always believed that children should be able to read whatever they want. I was reading Jackie Collins in my early teens, books dripping in glamour, populated by desirable and exciting characters involved in Hollywood-style debauchery, rampant sex, drug use, prostitution and criminal racketeering. I and my other prepubescent friends would gleefully pass these tomes around, giggling together at certain incredibly well-thumbed pages. Jilly Cooper, Shirley Conran and Sidney Sheldon were also favourites, along with the dark world of Virginia Andrews. Did it do us any harm? Definitely not. It gave us a glimpse into an exciting adult world from a position of complete safety. These books were gripping, truly unputdownable, with characters that were so real they sucked you into their universe entirely and when you came to the last page, you suffered a pang at having to leave them, no matter how satisfying the ending.
I was also addicted to horror stories. The desperate, bone-shaking loneliness suffered by the monster in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein haunts me years after reading it. I still shiver at the memory of certain scenes in Stephen King’s Salem’s Lot, and it took me a decade to stop checking under my bed after reading his compulsively horrifying collection of short stories, Bag of Bones.
From the above, you may gather that I don’t censor my own daughter’s reading. Sigh!.... I don’t need to. It’s a constant source of astonishment to me that a child who is the product of two such dedicated bookworms has zero interest in reading. I’d be delirious with delight if she read a Jilly Cooper, no matter how racy. So you can imagine how I felt when she asked me to order her a copy of Icebreaker, a book that she and her friends were buzzing about.
You can also imagine my reaction when shortly after the book arrived, I got a subsequent call from her form teacher, telling me that he’d confiscated it, and asked me to call in to discuss it. Immediately, I got that wonderful warm, fuzzy feeling of self-righteous indignation. What a prude! What a stick-in-the-mud! It’s only sex, for goodness’ sake, I thought.
To be fair to him, he stated that it wasn’t his job to dictate what I thought was suitable for my own child to read. He merely asked me to read the book myself before giving it back to her.
So I did read the book. And I was shocked. Not by the sex. I was stunned by the weak and flimsy storyline, the utter lack of dramatic tension and the appalling feminist message the book conveys. Jackie, Jilly and Shirley’s female characters certainly didn’t meekly wait around for a man to turn up and solve their problems. Their heroines had big dreams and were willing to make huge sacrifices for them. Icebreaker? The main character is supposedly training to be an Olympic figure skater, yet there is no suggestion of the hours of brutal daily training this must entail, and
she’s constantly drinking and partying and getting her kit off. Jackie Collins masterfully shows the dark side of promiscuity and debauchery, the very real physical and psychological consequences and the subsequent potential for self-loathing. Instead, Icebreaker celebrates a culture of casual sex without any attempt to describe the potential emotional and physical fallout. The characters just tumble into bed with each other without any kind of build-up, and therefore the sex scenes, though graphically described, are utterly unerotic and boring. Jackie, Jilly, Shirley and Co knew how important the build-up to a sex scene was. The enemies-to-lovers trope only works if the characters have to work really hard at it.
I bet you’re dying to know if I withheld the book from my daughter. I didn’t. I told her that it was a terrible book, but she read it anyway. (I should have told her what a wonderful, improving novel it was, then she wouldn’t have touched it with a barge pole.) The consolation? We’ve had a couple of long discussions about it, and when you get to my age (‘You’re so cringe, Mum!’) finding topics that engage your teen are worth their weight in gold.
