Young Adult Blog Party: Do Authors Have a Responsibility to Their Readers?

It is a miracle; I am posting. Actually posting. Thanks to Matt over at The Little Engine That Couldn't and his wonderful Blog Party, I have an actual idea for a post. Hurrah!

The blog party is all about a genre known best as YA, or Young Adult. I've seen a lot of talk on YA review blogs lately about what is actually appropriate for books for teens, and it's made me wonder: do the writers have a responsibility for the appropriateness?

My first answer would be very loud and very in the negative if you asked me this question. In fact, I might even slap you upside the head for comedic effect. Unfortunately, my second reply would be a quiet and begrudging yes. But not in the way you might think.
 A lot of aforementioned bloggers have talked about the sexual and explicit content of books. In fact, I'm pretty sure the (what seems to me when I have done no research whatsoever) rise in the 'Christian' genre is linked to this. Adults want their kids to read something 'clean' that affirms their own views and makes them accessible to what one adult calls 'the people of the tunnel', who laugh cynically at anything they need to believe in that isn't a fanon OTP. And that's good for them. I'm not going to go into that because it's a whole different kettle of morals.
 What I am going to go into is this idea that our young, impressionable minds can be dirtied and manipulated more than those of adults. This is where my emphatic, instinctive 'no' came from. Our society acknowledges that the media can manipulate us... but they also think that our generation -- the turned on generation, the one that will go and look for its own answers if it doesn't like the ones it finds -- are more likely to be twisted, simply because of our age. I have a giant issue with this. I may be gullible, but the rest of my generation aren't as stupid. If we see sex in a book, we're not going to be ruined like a maiden in Victorian literature. If we read a swear word in a book, it's not going to make us go around repeating it (after all, by the time you've made your way into the 'Young Adult' section of WHSmiths, you've already learnt a lot of things your parents never wanted you to know). We don't, as much as adults might feel it is their duty to do so, need to be protected from these things in our literature.

We need to explore them.

 And this is why I think that authors -- and not just the authors, but their editors and publishers too -- have a responsibility to us, their young readers. These people have a responsibility to show us the entire world, preferably objectively, and let us make up our own ideas. Like I said before, we're the internet generation; if we don't like what we hear, we'll Google search until we see something we agree with more. But we need to know we don't like it before we go a-looking. And we can't do that if we have clean, or even worse, biased novels shoved down our throats. The longer I spend on this earth, arguing my views with opposing parties, the more I think that, however right my political and philosophical views seem to me, it is wrong to try and force people onto my side. As a writer, I don't want to be writing novels as propaganda for my own beliefs. Not any more. I want to write something that will make people think about -- explore -- something. If they happen to find that they believe what I believe, then hurray. But that shouldn't be the main aim.

 In short, authors do indeed have a responsibility to their readers: not to censor things they don't need to know, but to let them think about the very things that the rest of the media restricts and come to their own conclusions.
At least, I think so.

Charlotte out!

Review: Angelology by Danielle Trussoni

Yes, I am back. But only because I need to vent/procrastinate/...alright, I'm too scared to go get the revision book for Physics back off my twin brother because he's an arse, okay?
But really, I needed to vent about this one.
Evangeline has lived at the convent for half of her life, but soon it will no longer be safe: her meeting with a seemingly innocuous art historian, Verlaine, have started wheels turning that should never be turned. A treasure will be unearthed, and life might just go to Hell. Literally. Sort of literally.

Reviews on Amazon and Why You Should Not Take Them as Gospel If You Value Your Reading Experience

Welcome to the world of rants, rants and more rants. Yes, this is the low down on Amazon reviews! Hurrah!

I hate Amazon reviews with a passion. The only reason I ever write them myself is when I have to. I've heard along the Internet grapevine (so it might not be true) that Amazon have been deleting some reviews. Not in a control-the-press kind of way, but in a stop-authors-bad-mouthing-the-competition and friends-of-authors-giving-them-completely-false-good-reviews kind of way. If that is the case, then they darn well haven't been deleting the right reviews.
 I may have moaned before about how my Kindle is registered to my mum's account from before I had my own and how I can't send books to it and swapping it to my account would mean losing the 150 or so books I've read (and the good hundred or so that I haven't). Well, it means that my mum has to buy books for me.
 And that's where 'the good hundred or so I haven't' bit comes in. See, a lot of them are just books by Austen or Stoker or someone old which I just haven't yet had the willpower to get through. But a large amount are books with rave Amazon reviews.
 "Why won't you read it?" my mum will say. "It's got forty five-star reviews on Amazon!"
 Fact is, Amazon reviews lie. I don't know if that's because the idea of reviewing only appeals to people who, like me, hate to be harsh, or if the general public really are that easily pleased, but I've found that even the worst books are praised to within an inch of their lives. In fact, you're more likely to find a good book in the deep dark hole of 'mixed reviews' than the shining temple of 'five stars'.
 Which is why, occasionally, I'll write an Amazon review. Not because I loved the book, nor even because I love cutting the souls out of fellow writers in a fit of jealousy. No, I write the review so that maybe, just maybe, someone about to buy that book, that stupid book with no punctuation, the whole love-at-first-sight-with-no-explanation gig and a strange view of racism towards Native Americans, will realise that there's at least one bad review, and it's logical and cutting enough that it might possibly be true. And then they'll stop themselves from buying it, at least until they've harvested reviews from the farther reaches of the Internet.

I just thought I'd warn you. Sorry for the mini-rant, but, hopefully, not taking Amazon reviews as Gospel may just save your life one day.

Yeah, I wouldn't count on it either.

Reader out!

'Extended Reading?'

 Ughh.
 This is my mum's new favourite thing, since my twin brother's English teacher sent home a list. Unfortunately, it's not so much mine.
 Apparently, reading widely all the time widens your vocabulary, helps you notice language patterns, yadda yadda yadda. Extended reading is about reading things you can understand, and is fun and enjoyable.
 No.
 To me, extended reading books are what I call 'old people books'. They were written a hundred or so years ago, and the people who read them are usually adults who read them for enjoyment or were forced to read them at school.