Back to the Bobbsey Twins?

For those of you too young to catch the reference in the title, the Bobbsey Twins were a series of novels for young readers popular when I was growing up. They were popular with librarians because they promoted the highly sanitized family values of the 1940s and 50s, not so popular with young readers who found them deadly dull.

If this article from the Guardian is correct, we may be moving back in that direction. The culture wars have hit the young adult publishing field.

These are just the latest battles in a war that seems to be escalating over who should control the way that people from marginalised communities appear in YA fiction. In August 2016, the Mexican-American author EE Charlton-Trujillo’s verse novel When We Was Fierce was delayed after several bloggers criticised its attempt to capture the voice of a black teenager. It has still not been published, and is not mentioned on Charlton-Trujillo’s website. In the months that followed, three speculative fiction novels, The Black Witch by Laurie Forest, American Heart by Laura Moriarty and The Continent by Keira Drake, attracted protests for their allegedly racist content. Forest published regardless, and with great success, despite a campaign of one-star reviews and emails to her publisher. Moriarty published, too, although Kirkus magazine, which had defended The Black Witch, downgraded and revised its review of American Heart, because it said the article “fell short of meeting our standards for clarity and sensitivity”. Drake, however, was convinced by her critics, 455 of whom signed a petition demanding that The Continent, “a racist garbage fire” according to one fellow author, be delayed to allow “additional editorial focus”. A substantially revised version appeared in March 2018.