The Very Intersectional Caterpillar: Lefty children’s literature is coming to a library near you.:
Recently, I perused three emails from bookstores offering children’s book recommendations from a national “Indie Next” program organized by the American Booksellers Association (ABA). Amid 93 new books, all published since May, I couldn’t find one that would appeal to my boys. The choices included a “feel-good contemporary romance” about a young trans athlete fighting against a “discriminatory law targeting trans athletes”; a book about a young lesbian with pansexual and nonbinary friends who denounced her white privilege; a “queer coming of age story” about a young lesbian who joins the boy’s football team; a young-adult novel about genderfluidity by a non-binary writer who is the mother of a transgender child; a “tale of self-discovery” about a bisexual love triangle; a book about a transgender witch named Wyatt; and a “fabulously joyful” novel about “drag, prom, and embracing your inner queen” that featured “a fat, openly gay boy stuck in a small West Texas town.” Other titles included the tale of a Puerto Rican eighth-grader who “navigates . . . the systemic pressures of toxic masculinity and housing insecurity in a rapidly gentrifying Brooklyn”; a young-adult thriller with a bisexual protagonist that explores the “politics of systemic racism”; and Don’t Hate the Player, a novel about gamers I thought would appeal to the boys until I realized it was about a young feminist battling misogyny from the “male-dominated gaming community.”
My son, a sophomore now (WHAT? He’s only five, ainna?), and for an English project, he was allowed to choose from a menu of books to read, with wide ranging topics from all cops are bastards to all soldiers are war criminals to coming of age and coming out. When I was in high school, I read Last of the Mohicans as a sophomore and A Tale of Two Cities as a freshman–among other things.
The good news is that he and a number of his classmates see it for what it is and aren’t especially duped by it.
They’re not becoming readers, either, though.
