Carnegie medal winner blasted as ‘vile and dangerous’. Could there be a better review for a YA author? Kevin Brookes (and his publishers) must be delighted.
Some background: on 23 June the Carnegie and Greenaway medals, the oldest and most prestigious awards given to children’s books, were announced. The Bunker Diary by Kevin Brooks won the Carnegie, and all power and congratulations to Kevin. I haven’t yet read the book, but even if I hadn’t already intended to that headline would send me straight to an online bookshop. As it will teenagers.
Oh Daily Telegraph, don’t you get it? Call a book for young adults (young adults, note, not young children) ‘vile and dangerous’ and every teenager in town will want to read it! It was ever thus: in 1997, Junk, Melvin Burgess’s story of teenage heroin addicts, won the Carnegie, and was predicted to herald an epidemic of copy-cat drug users. Back in my teenage day, Judy Blume’s Forever was banned by my school library from under-14s, presumably to prevent us from having sex. (What actually happened is that we got the older kids to take it out for us then passed it round the class, along with The Thorn Birds, Lace and James Herbert’s The Rats. Most of us didn’t have sex afterwards).
With all the brow-beating and hair-tearing going on in the UK at the moment about how to get our kids to read, why does our media get so hysterical about something that kids might want to read? Or should they only read what certain adults deem suitable for them to read? Young adults are exactly that – adults, who are young, and just like adults they can make choices and form opinions of their own. If they don’t like The Bunker Diary they’ll stop reading it, but, you know what Daily Telegraph? If you hadn’t branded it as unsuitable, more of them wouldn’t have bothered reading it in the first place.
Writing about writing 