Popular Books for Tweens and Teens
What is the world coming to? I’ve got about 10 years before my son is a teenager and I’m already afraid of what he’s going to encounter. When I was a teenager a bazillion years ago, I concentrated on my school work and extracurricular activities. I might have thought about boys every now and then but never got involved in serious romantic relationships, not to mention doing drugs and having sex.
Today’s tweens and teens, though, are surrounded by salaciousness both on TV and in real life. According the Shreveport Times, even books targeted for this age group are racier than ever before.
In many of today’s teen novels, boys and girls are blase about sleeping together. Drugs are part of the social scene, and kids party all night and still get into Ivy League universities. And, of course, they’re dressed in La Perla lingerie and Manolo Blahnik mules.
Readers of these lascivious books (can you tell I’m pulling out all the synonyms?) can be as young as nine-years-old! Would you let your children read the following best sellers?
- Gossip Girl by Cecily von Ziegesar (Little, Brown and Co., $9.99). This series about wealthy Upper East Side New York City high-schoolers has sold 2.2 million copies in this country alone. The seventh installment, Nobody Does It Better has been on The New York Times’ best-sellers list since May. (No. 8 hits bookstores in October.) A spin-off series, The It Girl debuts in November.
- The Clique by Lisi Harrison (Little, Brown and Co., $9.99). The series, about a group of friends at a private upscale New York City suburban school, is geared more toward younger girls, ages 9 to 12. No. 4 is due in October. Harrison is under contract through book No. 8.
- The A-List by Zoey Dean (Little, Brown and Co., $9.99). Dean is a pseudonym for a writing team, but that hasn’t slowed this series’ popularity about teenage Anna’s move from Manhattan high society to Hollywood’s high school in-crowd. Book No. 5, Back in Black comes out in September.
- The Au Pairs by Melissa de la Cruz (Simon & Schuster, $14.95). Skinny-dipping is the second in this summer series about three teenage au pairs in the exclusive Hamptons on Long Island, N.Y. De la Cruz is signed for Book 3, which is scheduled to be out next summer. Her new series, “Blue Bloods,” is about rich kids who also are vampires. It is due out next year also.
I remember being both confused and embarrassed when I read Forever by Judy Blume sometime in junior high. I’d checked it out of the local public library and didn’t have a clue what it was about. Blume was tarnished in my mind forever after.
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POSTED IN: Children's Books (11 to 14 yrs)
2 opinions for Popular Books for Tweens and Teens
Qadira
Aug 9, 2005 at 10:30 am
I’ve been a romance-novel reader since elementary school. I remember reading "Boy Meets Girl" in the 5th grade (mostly because I got caught reading it in class when I was supposed to be doing math, and suffered much humiliation) I think it might have been one of the Sweet Valley High books.
I read Ursula K. LeGuin’s "Very Far Away from Anywhere Else", and a bunch of those ’serial novels’ that used to be published in the women’s magazines.
I read the book "Lace" at the tender age of 12 or 13, and boy did that ever provide some non-school-related sex education.
I think that saying kids are being exposed somehow to -more- in the books now than they ‘used to be’, is an error. I guess the difference is in what is being hyped and promoted, and I would agree that there seems to be more sex and relationships involved in what is advertised now than when I was a teen, and I would have to read the new books to be able to say if the Situations shown are more explicit than the ones in the books I read at that age.
A lot of us read all the adult level books anyway, and weren’t so interested in the stuff marketed to us at the time.
Lei
Aug 9, 2005 at 11:22 am
Q, Come to think of it, I remember reading Clan of the Cave Bears and Danielle Steele in high school. *blush* As always, it’s still the parents and peers that influence kids’ behavior more than external things like video games and books.
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