Darkness Too Visible Response

   In Darkness Too Visible by Megan Cox Gurdon, the author is trying to explain to the readers why most Young Adult novels are inappropriate to teens our age. The author wants us readers to know how overexposed us teens are too scary/inappropriate scenarios and situations in real life or even in fiction. Gurdom is also trying to make me and other readers think it’s not okay for teens to read YA books involving sex, drugs, suicide, paranormal creatures, and other “dark things”. However. I don’t agree with this point of view because the majority of teens today are already exposed to inappropriate things, and even if they don’t know, they have a right to know what real life situations are like and how to get out of ones you could be struggling with.

In addition to my claim, Gurdon uses very loaded and biased words that aren’t necessarily relevant to many teens opinions for YA fiction. Many of the words she uses puts dark images into the reader’s head which is another example of how biased and exaggerated her opinion is. For example, in paragraph 1 on page four, she describes the teen books as “lurid” which means very vivid in color, especially so as to create an unpleasantly harsh or unnatural effect. I do take into consideration her point of view, but the only evidence she uses in a real life situation is a quote from a 46 year old mother buying a book for her teen daughter, and she’’is disturbed so she leaves empty handed. Yes, that may be her view of the books. What what about her 13 year old daughter? Does she have no say in what she wants to read? I understand there are limits to what children and teens are allowed to read, but drugs and sex are very much common in adult or young adult life. Children have every right to be exposed to this and their view on YA literature isn’t included in this article which I find ironic because the whole focus of the article is their opinion, but all we hear about is their parents opinion.

As you can see from my claim, I do not agree with Gurdon’s opinion on YA literature. From this article I learned that many adults seem to be deciding what their child should read I understand that there are limits to inappropriateness in books, but I still think that the parents should acknowledge that sex or drugs- as two examples, because they will eventually be exposed to it in real life, and you can’t keep your child in a bubble from the outside world forever. It isn’t fair to the child because they have every right to know. Some parts and books that she gave as examples to support her claim were very crazy and inappropriate and I don’t know if I would read them, but then again there were many great books which she gave as examples of bad books by just taking out the bad parts and using them as examples. But without those scenes of sex and use of drugs the book wouldn’t be realistic and wouldn’t be interesting. It honestly wouldn’t be a real book.