John Scalzi. I’d read Old Man’s War and at least one of the sequels and was generally unimpressed for reasons that aren’t worth getting into in any real detail. Years later I went back for The Interdependency series and was delighted by it. Since then I’ve read most of his other novels and Old Man’s War is really the odd entry out - the one thing he’s done that didn’t click with me.
This is All I ask by Lynn Kurland, though it really has nothing to do with the book which is just a historical romance. Years ago, my wife and I started our own little book club with just the two of us. I’d ask her to read something that I adored, she’d do the same, and then we’d talk about the books. This book fell well, well outside my comfort zone in almost every respect.
There was nothing wrong with the novel. It was a perfectly serviceable example of the genre. I did not know this at the time because it was the first romance novel I’d read period. And that was the real challenge: reading something that some part of me believed I wasn’t allowed to read. But I picked it up because duty and honor both demanded it. (She’d slogged through Still Life With Woodpecker by Tom Robbins, which I’ve come to understand is not nearly so charming or insightful to a thirty-something woman as it was to me as a teenager.)
But read it I did. And despite wanting to reject it on that basic gendered principle that said I should do so, I finished it. And in the end, when it came time to discuss it…well I did not give a charitable assessment. But that assessment was built on how the lessons learned by the protagonists throughout the book - how to be more independent for the female lead, how to accept that he was no longer a man of action from the male - was thrown out. It wasn’t just a lazy way to end things with a happily ever after, the end also undermined all of that character growth.
I’m proud of reading that book because that was the first time I really allowed myself to break the rules of my assigned gender and approach some small, trinkety part of life with an open mind where I judged something for what it really was rather than letting the odd social rules dictate my response for me.
In large part because something being controversial says very little about whether or not it is suitable for children. For example, books about gay or transgender people are often considered to be controversial and plenty of people argue that such books are not suitable for children. But why? Gay and transgender people exist. Reading a book about it isn’t going to turn someone gay or transgender. Similarly, books that involve romance and and even cut to black sex scenes are common enough in the YA space and rarely controversial until the people involved are queer. In effect, this controversy is controversial because the people who don’t think this kind of thing is a problem don’t understand why someone else thinks that it is.
And on the other side of the controversy is people who recognize things such as gay and transgender people actually exist and that they, like literally everyone else on the planet, like to read stuff featuring characters who are similar to them! A transgender kid worried that they’ll never find a romantic partner is going to want a bit of escapist YA reading for exactly the same reason that countless other kids who have no idea how to go about the whole romance thing. A gay kid will want to read stories set in a word where things work out for a gay kid. For that matter, more than a few queer kids might unexpectedly find themselves in reading a book, potentially skipping over a great deal of very dangerous, heartbreaking work that is so often required. And these people generally recognize that, sure, some parent might have a reason to disagree and begrudgingly admit that said parent has a right to do so, but why would that right extend to anyone else’s kids? After all, if such a book were banned, you’re right back at the same problem only now the roles are reversed.
Who is really helped by this? Certainly not the queer kids, or the other children who might read such a book and realize that queer people are just people.